Google Search Central starts a video series on edge-case technical SEO

A question an SEO team argues about regularly, whether putting keywords in a URL still helps ranking, has an on-record Google answer this week. Google Search Central published the first episode of a new YouTube series on 14 October called The Non-Canonical Cabinet, hosted by Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin, which covers edge-case technical SEO questions that do not belong on a standard FAQ page.

Search Engine Journal's write-up by Matt G. Southern captures what the episode says. The series was teased on 6 October and the first episode landed eight days later. The description calls it a sitcom-style comedy built around questions website owners actually ask.

What the first episode answers

Illyes called keywords in a URL "an incredibly small signal," saying "it really only matters when we have absolutely nothing else to go on," and giving a site seconds old with no content as the example. Once Google sees content, keywords in the domain and URL "become basically irrelevant," he said. John Mueller called URL keywords "a very small ranking factor" in 2016 and "a very very lightweight factor" in 2021, which the SEJ piece notes and which puts the new line in the same place as the old guidance.

On separators, Illyes said Google treats underscore-joined words in a URL path as one long word. Google recommends hyphens as the common separator across the web, which Google's own URL structure documentation gives for what it calls historical reasons, since underscores often mark concepts that stay together such as function names in programming.

Emojis in a domain versus a path

The emoji rules split by position. Illyes said current internet standards do not allow emojis in a domain name. A 2017 ICANN Board Resolution lists emoji as "disallowed by the current technical standards for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)," while noting they can still be registered in some country-code top-level domains at the second level.

The URL path has fewer limits. Illyes said Googlebot will crawl a path containing an emoji, "and our system will actually process it." Browsers percent-encode those characters, so a chicken emoji becomes %F0%9F%90%94 in the path. Not every browser or social media app renders the emoji, and some show what Illyes called "a string of gibberish" in its place. Google's URL structure documentation already recommends percent encoding for non-ASCII characters and uses an emoji in one of its own examples.

Comment threads under each episode are where Google is asking for the next round of edge-case questions. The next episode, SEJ notes, covers robots.txt, with no stated release schedule.

Source

Search Engine Journal, Google Launches A Video Series For Odd Technical SEO Questions. The first episode is on Google Search Central's YouTube channel, and the matching docs page is URL structure.