Canonical tags and UTF8

Question

Would the following 2 canonical link tags be viewed by spiders as pointing to the same URL?

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

Answer 1

ŷ is an HTML entity that represents the Unicode character with code point 375 in decimal notation. In hexadecimal it'd be 0x177 so we are talking about U+0177 which is ŷ.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
• http://inamidst.com/stuff/unidata/
• http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0177/index.htm

That means that both URLs are exactly the same if:

1. They're displayed in the context of an HTML document.
2. The document declares a proper character set that supports such symbol and the editor you used to type it inserted the right code.

If the browser displays ŷ in both cases it's likely that character set is correct but you should make sure it is.

Answer 2

Not 100% sure, but I think they both would point to the same URL. But keep in mind, that looking at W3 standards, they often suggest links to be encoded.

Answer 3

if you communicate your HTML as UTF-8 the url is seen as the same.

Answer 4

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

You should always percent encode unicode characters.