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Canonical tags and UTF8

Will the following 2 canonical link tags be displayed by spiders pointing to the same URL?

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&#375;" /> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&#375;" /> - encoded
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/ŷ" /> - unencoded

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4 answers

&#375; is an HTML object that represents a Unicode character with a code point of 375 in decimal notation. In hexadecimal, this will be 0x177, so we are talking about U + 0177, which is ŷ .

This means that both URLs are exactly the same if:

  • They are displayed in the context of the HTML document.
  • The document declares the correct character set that supports that character, and the editor you used to enter inserted the correct code.

If is displayed in the browser, in both cases it is likely that the character set is correct, but you must make sure that it is.

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Not 100% sure, but I think both of them will point to the same URL. But keep in mind that when looking at W3 standards, they often offer encoding links.

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if you are reporting your HTML as UTF-8, the URL is treated as the same.

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Even if you can expect it to work in modern browsers, http://www.example.com/ŷ is an invalid URL .

You should always encode Unicode characters.

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