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Do search engines consider the length of non-English characters or do they consider the length of percentage-encoded characters for an SEO score?

For example:

http://example.com/%d8%b1%d9%88%d8%b3%d9%8a%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d9%85%d9%84-%d8%b9%d9%84%d9%89-%d8%a7%d8%a8%d8%aa

I searched here and found related posts are 3 to 7 years old. Is there any update in how popular search engines index URLs with non-English characters?

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Every URL parser should be using RFC 3986 as the official definition of the URL format and should follow the rules on how to encode and decode URL. That guarantees to work properly with the rest of the Internet.

Search Engines normalize URLs mainly to reduce crawling and indexing of duplicate pages, so, in the end, the length they will use is associated to the normalized URL.

As they have stated in their official guide, we should always work with encoded UTF-8 URLs :

However, be sure to use UTF-8 encoding in the URL (in fact, we recommend using UTF-8 wherever possible) and remember to escape the URLs properly when linking to them.

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  • Thanks for the reply. Could you pl confirm what should I do if my URL after percentage-encoding is 171 characters long. (As per SEO it be about 50 to 60 characters)
    – Shailesh
    Oct 18, 2019 at 4:51
  • You don't need to do anything, for searchers that URL will be 50/60 characters long as they will normalize it. That's what really matters. However, you can use Google Search Console > Inspect URL to check how Google is working with your URL and confirm everything is correct support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en
    – Emirodgar
    Oct 18, 2019 at 6:41

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