Emoji in seoTitle & (un)Friendly URL | 🔥😅😲💛🤩🤮😊

[SeNioR-]

Hi. seoTitle function currently does not remove Emoji from URLs. Link with emoji becomes unfriendly. Consider adding a new preg_replace

$value = preg_replace('/[^ -\x{2122}]\s+|\s*[^ -\x{2122}]/u','',$value);

 

The copied and pasted URL looks like this: 

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924-emoji-in-seotitle-unfriendly-url-%F0%9F%94%A5%F0%9F%98%85%F0%9F%98%B2%F0%9F%92%9B%F0%9F%A4%A9%F0%9F%A4%AE%F0%9F%98%8A/

 

Edited December 3, 2022 by SeNioR-

[Daniel F]

What browser are you using? 

 

I see it in the address bar and even the copied URL is

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924-emoji-in-seotitle-unfriendly-url-🔥😅😲💛🤩🤮😊

[teraßyte]

@Daniel F I made a test topic in the Test Posting forum so you can see the issue => https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470928-emoji-test-✂️%EF%B8%8F/

 

 

The topic title contains this text:

Emoji test => ✂️

And the url in Chrome browser on Windows (107.0.5304.123) is:

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470928-emoji-test-✂️%EF%B8%8F/

 

Edited December 4, 2022 by teraßyte

[opentype]

Emoji are just characters that happen to be displayed as a color image. Their encoding shouldn’t be treated differently. In fact, I wouldn’t even know how, since they do not even have a dedicated Unicode range. Some were matched to existing pictograms and every year new ones are being added. Maintaining a complete list of emoji to be removed from URLs would be quite cumbersome. 

[SeNioR-]

3 hours ago, opentype said:

Maintaining a complete list of emoji to be removed from URLs would be quite cumbersome. 

You can use a regex that selects the entire Emoji range.

[opentype]

As already said: Emojis are not limited to a specific Unicode range. 

[WebCMS]

The superfluous traditional chars that get eliminated from URLs are not in any particular range like the space, hyphen, underscore, percent, star, etc.

It may be a matter of adding the Unicode values to a table and cache the result to eliminate matching ones. If we address the available/known emojis, that would be a big start. You could use public databases of emoji-unicode mapping online as below and import into a table (no need to build the list laboriously). As new emojis get introduced, they could be imported into the table without having to change any code.

https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71404081/how-to-obtain-a-full-list-of-unicode-emojis-from-the-unicode-website

Emojis can stay in the Titles for amusement but should be eliminated from the URLs that are formed from titles to keep them clean as IC's URLs are not simple ID-based like

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924

This partial URL works - https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924-e

and it would be a challenge to manage URLs with emojis like 

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924-emoji-in-seotitle-unfriendly-url-🔥😅😲💛🤩🤮😊/

cooking-with-cats-🐈%E2%80%8D⬛🐈%E2%80%8D⬛

as they cannot be typed easily and the only way to use them is by copy/pasting them.

Emojis serve no purpose in URLs (just like some chars that get eliminated from URLs) and they are not even good for SEO

https://www.google.com/search?q=emojis+in+urls

[balazsp]

Currently I am still using this plugin (I know, it is a plugin, not an app, but it works with 4.7.x).

"Friendly URL Translit By Ilya Hoilik https://ipshelp.ru" (the url is not working either it is for search purposes if you want to hunt for it)

Iirc it used to be a free plugin in the marketplace, it removes all non-standard chars from the url. 

It keeps the emojis (and accented non-English characters, etc) in the topic title, but removes them from the URLs.

Imo it should be part of the core functionality for SEO. 

 

[Meris4x4]

8 hours ago, balazsp said:

Imo it should be part of the core functionality for SEO.

Absolutely agreed.

[opentype]

9 hours ago, WebCMS said:

and they are not even good for SEO

https://www.google.com/search?q=emojis+in+urls

That’s a somewhat dishonest approach. You suggest that the claim “not even good for seo” is proven by the links that the Google search would reveal, yet I checked the best results and they say NOTHING of the sort. The query doesn’t address “seo” in any way and so the results also don’t. They discuss the possibility of having emojis in URLs and agree that they are possible. 

[WebCMS]

20 hours ago, opentype said:

That’s a somewhat dishonest approach. You suggest that the claim “not even good for seo” is proven by the links that the Google search would reveal, yet I checked the best results and they say NOTHING of the sort. The query doesn’t address “seo” in any way and so the results also don’t. They discuss the possibility of having emojis in URLs and agree that they are possible. 

https://www.google.com/search?q=emojis+in+urls+seo

Google is featuring this result on the top of 1st page for a reason with highlighted text -

Avoid using emojis in URLs as it is generally not recommended and creates indexing problems and SEO issues. Search engines depend on the information containing text to index web pages and those text that has emojis are considered non-standard characters.

URL address - however, it’s not the best place. The website address should be clear and user-friendly. It’s also important to mention that the search engine doesn’t have an obligation to show the emoji and may not be rendered or in color on some O/S's. If it doesn’t display it, you’ll simply see a chain of characters instead which won’t look attractive.

Punycode

Google

Bing (it only shows the first emoji but the unknown character box for the other two)

https://www.google.com/search?q="emojis+in+urls+for+seo"

Most search engines will show no results when using emoticons. So make sure you only use emoji in your page title and meta description, and not emoticons. Finally, Google only shows emoji in its organic search results and not in its Text and Shopping Ads. So don't try to put emoji in your ads.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-emojis-wont-hurt-or-help-seo/436079/

About emojis in titles/meta - there’s no guarantee Google will show them in search results. Google rewrites a majority of titles as it is, but even if it chooses to display the title you’ve written it may disregard the emojis. you’re probably better off writing titles and descriptions in plain text. Emojis are allowed, but it’s highly unlikely Google will display them. There’s no SEO advantage to using them, either

 

Avoid Using Emojis or Special Characters

https://susodigital.com/blog/optimising-url-slugs-for-seo

Google’s official guidelines are clear about this: you should not use non-ASCII characters in your URL, if you want it to be as well-optimised as possible. 

This includes emojis, as well as characters from all languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, even if your page is written in one of them.

For search engines, this is mainly important before your page is indexed, but when it comes to user-friendliness, using emojis and special characters in your URL slug can pose more serious issues to your viewers.

In many instances, non-ASCII characters will not display correctly on people’s screens, making it impossible to copy-paste, or type out your link. 

✅ User-friendly URL: www.susodigital.com/blog/what-is-a-url-slug 

❌ User-hostile URL: www.susodigital.com/blog/URL-蛞蝓-是-什么 

 

Similar issues

Xenforo - https://xenforo.com/community/threads/remove-emoji-from-url.159250/

Discourse - https://meta.discourse.org/t/thinking-dont-put-emoji-name-in-topic-slugs/76595/26

 

https://mangools.com/blog/seo-emojis/

What google does or not with emojis has changed over years many times, there is still no guarantee google would include them in ranking and there are instances where google truncated important keywords due to emojis thereby reducing the page ranks.

If the title contains just emojis and users want to search by Title only, not many users are tech savvy to grab emojis from the internet to paste into the search field. Title should always contain some word(s) for searchability (even if it contains emojis).

URLs should work by just the ID without needing to input the optional title text in the slug so if there are any emojis in the URL, it won't be difficult to query by just ID (if users know the topic/article ID). Also there should be an option to search by topic ID, article ID, etc:

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/470924

When "emojis" exist in the url and we click in the address bar, the cursor is not visible while using left/right arrow keys which is a bad UX.

The aspect of including emojis in the URLs or not can be implemented as a configurable switch in the ACP with a default value of ON so it works as it does now (if at all emojis are excluded from URLs, it should be implemented as a switch in ACP). Those who want to continue including emojis in the urls don't have to do any config due to its default value.

Edited February 24 by WebCMS

[Matt]

On 2/24/2024 at 6:21 AM, WebCMS said:

Google’s official guidelines are clear about this: you should not use non-ASCII characters in your URL, if you want it to be as well-optimised as possible. 

Guess it sucks if you're Chinese, Japanese, etc? They'll get no URL at all other than the ID. French and other languages that use accents will just have whole letters missing too?

I do not think for one second that Google will punish you for using non ASCII characters. It's all UTF8MB4 so who cares?

Spend more time managing your community and less time worrying about what the URL looks like when you paste it and that investment in time will server you much better.