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I'm putting together an English language site which contains its own German translation (don't worry, I've lived in Germany and I have a degree in Germanic and Slavonic Studies, it's proper German...).

I am wondering what the best practice is regarding extended Latin characters in URLs.

If I have a URL like:

https://example.com/fußgängerbrücke/

Am I better to link to it internally as:

  • a) /fußgängerbrücke/
  • b) /fu%C3%9Fg%C3%A4ngerbr%C3%BCcke/
  • c) /fussgaengerbruecke/

I have no problem doing any of the above and I am quite happy to use .htaccess mod_rewrite if and where necessary to ensure that variants all 301 to the correct canonical page.

On that note, a secondary question: which format (if different) should I be using for the <link rel="canonical"> in the <head>?

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See how the Wikipedia handles this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu%C3%9Fg%C3%A4ngerbr%C3%BCcke

<link rel="canonical" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu%C3%9Fg%C3%A4ngerbr%C3%BCcke"/>
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  • Hah! Very smart approach. I never thought of that. Yes, it's /fu%C3%9Fg%C3%A4ngerbr%C3%BCcke/ in both internal links and rel="canonical". Thank you!
    – Rounin
    Jan 24, 2020 at 11:13

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