Google recently introduced “The Non-Canonical Cabinet,” a Search Central YouTube series discussing edge case technical SEO issues. On Oct. 14, they published the first video of this new series, which addresses items that may and may not be included within a domain name or URL path (such as emojis) as well as whether using keywords within URLs affects search rankings.
Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin are hosting this series. Google announced the series by posting a teaser video on Oct. 6, and asked all viewers to provide their own edge-case questions in the comments section of each post.
What The Series Is
A trailer released by Google on Oct. 6 says that the show “The Non-Canonical Cabinet” is a sitcom-style comedy based off specific questions asked by website owners and the SEO industry. Here is how the episode description puts it:
“These are questions that don’t belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features.”
In addition to this Illyes hosted “How Search Works,” a five part video series on Search Central from 2024. This video series took users through the process of crawling, indexing and serving. “The Non-Canonical Cabinet” however starts with users asking questions about search, instead of starting with the basics.
Domains And URL Paths Follow Different Rules
ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have established the technical guidelines for domain names. The IETF’s guidelines (RFC 1035, RFC 1123) include allowing letters, numbers, and hyphens within domain names; Prommawin stated that Google adheres to these same standards.
The addition of scripts to support languages other than Roman-based scripts (Chinese, Arabic) allows users to use domain names written in native scripts. These Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are translated into Punycode (“xn--“), a string that starts with ‘xn--‘. Browsers will usually display IDNs in their native script. However, Illyes mentioned that some IDN scripts contain similar characters to those in other languages, which can confuse people and browsers. For example, a Cyrillic letter is very close in appearance to an English “p”.
According to him, the current internet standards for domains do not allow “emojis in the domain name.” A 2017 ICANN Board Resolution states that emoji are “disallowed by the current technical standards for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).” The resolution does note that while emoji characters are prohibited under current standards, they can still be registered in certain country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) at the second level.
The URL path has fewer limits. Illyes said Googlebot will crawl a path that contains an emoji, and “our system will actually process it.” Browsers percent-encode those characters, so the episode’s chicken emoji becomes %F0%9F%90%94 in the path.
He said not every browser or social media app will display the emoji, and some show “a string of gibberish” in its place. Google’s URL structure documentation already covers the path side. It recommends percent encoding for non-ASCII characters and uses emoji in one of its examples.
Keywords And Word Separators
Illyes called keywords in a URL “an incredibly small signal.” “It really only matters when we have absolutely nothing else to go on,” he said, giving the example of a site that’s seconds old with no content. 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, statements I gathered when I looked at URLs as a ranking factor in 2023.
On separators, Illyes said Google treats words joined by underscores in a URL path “as one long word.” He added that this is sometimes fine, because Google may still be able to use the words, and that Google recommends hyphens as the common word separator across the web. Google’s documentation gives the same advice. It cites “historical reasons,” since underscores often mark concepts meant to stay together, such as function names in programming.
Why This Matters
The first Non-Canonical Cabinet episode provides you with Google’s on-record responses to clients’ inquiries regarding emojis, non-English characters, and keywords in URLs. The path advice provided is redundant with the URL structure documentation, therefore websites that are currently adhering to this document will need no modifications.
The keyword response from Illyes can be used as a reference for when your client desires URLs with high keyword density. He has indicated that there would be some value associated with such pages only if Google knew absolutely nothing else about them. In addition to the above information, the episode’s concluding recap tells viewers to stop trying to game search results by including large amounts of keyword data into their URLs.
The comments section of each video provides a forum where you may bring up additional edge cases that have not been covered within the official documentation.
Looking Ahead
The next Non-Canonical Cabinet episode covers robots.txt. Neither video description gives a release schedule, and the trailer and first episode went up eight days apart.
Featured Image: Screenshot from Google Search Central/YouTube, October 2026.
