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On my site I have a problem with my URL address from my Bulgarian version of my page. Why does it show lots of % characters in my URL? For example like this page.

When the URL really should look like this: 

econello.com/bg/застраховки/

Is there any setting I forgot to set?

unor
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Marcello Rongione
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    URLs only allow ASCII characters. Any non-ASCII characters must be encoded via URL encoding (if in path or query) or Punycode if in host address. Cyrillic characters are not ASCII characters. (This conversion is usually done by browsers immediately before sending the request, so it should still show URL in the unencoded version, if that is how it was received. Where do you see the encoded URL?) – Amadan Jan 15 '19 at 08:17
  • Ok, I understand! But can this have a negative impact on my SEO? Should I switch to English letters? For example like this: /bg/krediti/avto-lizingi-krediti/ instead of this: /bg/кредити/автокредити-и-автолизинг/ – Marcello Rongione Jan 15 '19 at 08:32
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    Regarding SEO, please read [tag:seo] tag's [info page](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/seo/info). – Amadan Jan 15 '19 at 08:33

1 Answers1

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This is percent-encoding, and in URIs it’s required for characters that are outside of the allowed set (which only includes a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and several special characters like -, /, ., etc.).

Many browsers display the decoded URL in their address bars. You can try it yourself: copy-paste the percent-encoded URL into Firefox’ address bar and hit Enter. It will display

/bg/застраховки/

instead of

/bg/%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8/

So there’s nothing you have to (or should) change.

(While IRIs would allow other characters, I think they typically get converted to URIs with percent-encoding for backwards compatibility, or because it’s considered to be an author error, as in HTML 4.01.)

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