If your site is in an non-ASCII language, like Arabic, you probably recognize this problem: your slugs turn into an ugly string of percent signs, capitals and numbers when they’re shared on social media or linked to. That doesn’t tempt people to click to your site! So, is there an SEO-friendly solution? Check out this week’s Ask Yoast!
Ahmed Saad emailed us on this subject:
My site’s content is in Arabic and that means that the slug looks very bad when it’s shared on social media. Should I change the URL language to English so it looks better or does that hurt my SEO?
Watch the video or read the transcript below for the answer!
Dealing with bad slugs for Arabic URLs:
‘I honestly don’t have a good answer to that because this slug is not good for your SEO either. This slug doesn’t really entice people to click. I guess that the best solution would be to get the shortest slug as possible in Arabic, because you can have i18n URLs. But support for that is not always as good across CMSes.
If that doesn’t work then you can certainly fall back to English, or to an English ‘way’ of writing your Arabic strings, which is something that a lot of Indian languages do. Good luck!’
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