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We have a fun question today from
Christian Oliveira in Madrid.
Christian wants to know--
A lot of European languages, like Spanish or French, have
special characters, like a C with a cedilla, and so on.
Would you recommend to use them in the URLs?
What about capital letters?
Would you 301 redirect mysite.com/Page to
mysite.com/page?
I really enjoy these questions.
So Google, in general, is able to handle special characters.
We've got provisions for Punycode and all kinds of ways
to handle URLs relatively well.
But if it's possible to avoid special characters in URLs, I
would recommend doing that, because Google is not the only
search engine in the world.
And a lot of search engines are not looking for unusual or
non-ASCII characters in the URL path.
So being able to handle those special URLs can be a little
bit tricky for search engines.
And so if it's possible to make it easily available
without the special characters, that's probably
the route that I would pick.
Otherwise, if users see various percents and escaping,
they're a little less likely to copy and paste that.
They are sometimes a little less likely to mail that, or
the URL might get long.
It could get truncated, those sorts of factors.
Now, the other part of this question was
about capital letters.
And I really enjoyed that.
In my experience, a lot of people want to use a capital
letter in the URL path, or even in their domain name.
And for me, at least, as a user who's been on the web for
a long time, it looks a little non-savvy to have it in the
domain name, because domain names, it really doesn't
matter whether you have a capital or
a lower-case letter.
So to see a capital example site dot com or in an email
address, Bob@ExampleSite.com, to me it looks almost a little
amateurish.
And it's very easy for users to get mixed up.
They they go to one URL path with the lower-case P, and
they expect to get the same content that they would get if
they go to slash upper case P.
So if you have the option, I personally would recommend
making pretty much all of your URL paths be lower-case.
If you're using upper-case, people are
going to mix that up.
They're going to type it wrong.
They're going to mail it to people and type it, and
they're going to get it mixed up.
So if it's possible, if you can standardize--
and the standard way to do it is with lower-case--
that's the way that I would recommend it.
Now, different web servers might have
different issues with that.
But if you have the ability to just make everything be
lower-case, that's probably the path
that I would recommend.
It's less so for search engines and less so for search
engine rankings and more just for consistency and to match
what most people are used to on the web.
When people are mailing each other, when people are typing
in URLs, it's just a little simpler for them to remember.
So I hope that advice helps a little bit.