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What can you actually put in a URL 🐔?
Can you put a chicken emoji 🐔in your domain name? What about your URL path? What about non-English characters? Welcome to the premiere of The Non-Canonical Cabinet—a series where Google Search Developer Advocates Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin dig through the vault to answer the weirdest, most hyper-specific edge cases of SEO. These are questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features. In this episode, they tackle the technical boundaries of domain names and URL paths, explain Punycode vs. percent encoding, and unpack why just because technology allows you to be weird doesn't mean you should. In this episode: 🌐 Who decides what goes in a domain name 🈶 Internationalized domain names and Punycode (xn--what?) 🐔🔥 Can emojis go in a domain? 📈 Do keywords in a URL help with ranking? 🔣 Emojis and non-English characters in the URL path, and percent-encoding ➖ Hyphens vs. underscores TL;DR: Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Keep URLs simple, readable and built for humans. Chapters: 00:00 – Welcome to The Non-Canonical Cabinet 01:33 – Can you put anything in a domain or URL path? 02:05 – Domain: understanding ICANN & RFC standards 03:46 – What is allowed in the domain name? ASCII, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), and Punycode 05:18 – Emoji in a domain name? 06:01 – Do keywords in a URL help with ranking? 07:02 – URL Paths: UTF-8, special characters, and "chicken gear" 08:28 – Encoding in a domain vs URL path 09:06 – Why emoji URLs might not be a good idea 10:45 – Hyphens vs. Underscores in URL paths 11:34 – Recap 📚 Learn more: URL structure best practices: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure 🗄️ Got a weird question you want us to pull from the cabinet? Don't let your edge-case questions gather dust! Leave it in the comments below! 🤖 Next episode: we try to put chicken in a robots.txt file. Like. Subscribe. Keep it Canonical. #GoogleSearchCent
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