SiteAud!tLint Support

Opportunity Technical SEO

URL contains non-ASCII characters

Severity
Opportunity
Impact
Low
Effort to fix
Medium
Issue code
url_non_ascii

Why it matters

Special characters must be encoded in URLs, which can break links in some tools and emails.

How to fix it

Use plain ASCII letters, numbers and hyphens in URLs.

What this means

The URL's path contains characters outside basic ASCII, such as accented letters (/café), non-Latin scripts (/обувь, /靴), emoji, or spaces. The evidence shows the decoded path so you can see the actual characters.

Is this a problem?

Often not. Browsers and search engines support these URLs: they are sent as percent-encoded bytes, so /café travels as /caf%C3%A9, and browsers show the readable form in the address bar. For a site in Russian, Japanese or Arabic, URLs in that language can help people recognise the page in search results.

It becomes a problem when the encoding is inconsistent:

  • Two versions of the same URL. One link uses é and another uses %C3%A9, or one uses the precomposed é and another e plus a combining accent. Servers may treat them as different addresses.
  • Spaces in URLs, which appear as %20 or + and break when pasted into emails and chat.
  • Shared links that turn into long strings of %xx codes in tools that do not decode them.
  • Copy-and-paste from a word processor, which brings in smart quotes and invisible characters.

How to fix it

  1. Decide per site: readable native-language URLs, or transliterated ASCII (/cafe, /obuv). Both work; mixing them does not.
  2. If you keep non-ASCII URLs, make sure every internal link, canonical tag, hreflang tag and sitemap entry uses exactly the same form.
  3. Replace spaces with hyphens.
  4. When changing URLs, redirect the old ones with a 301.

Verify the fix

Recrawl and check the URL Structure view in Pages. If two encodings of one page were both crawled, they also show up as Duplicate content.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Technical SEO score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick URL contains non-ASCII characters. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (medium), and in the issues CSV under the code url_non_ascii. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.

Guides that cover this issue