By Elena Vasquez

Google has confirmed that Googlebot will crawl and process URLs containing emojis, but the company's stance on keywords in URLs remains blunt: they are "an incredibly small signal." Gary Illyes, Google Search advocate, made both statements in the first episode of "The Non-Canonical Cabinet," a new YouTube series the company launched on Oct. 14.

The series sits on the Google Search Central channel and takes a sitcom-style comedy format. Illyes hosts it alongside Cherry Prommawin. Google teased the show with a trailer on Oct. 6 and asked viewers to submit their own edge-case questions in the comments.

The episode description frames the premise: "These are questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features."

This is not Illyes' first video project. He hosted "How Search Works," a five-part Search Central series in 2024 that walked through crawling, indexing and serving. The new show inverts that structure. It starts with user questions rather than fundamentals.

What are the rules for domains and URL paths?

Domains and URL paths follow different technical standards. ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force set the domain rules through RFC 1035 and RFC 1123. Those guidelines allow letters, numbers and hyphens. Prommawin said Google adheres to the same standards.

Non-Roman scripts complicate the picture. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) let users register domains in scripts such as Chinese or Arabic, and the system translates them into Punycode, a string beginning with "xn--". Browsers usually display the native script. Illyes warned that some scripts contain lookalike characters across languages, such as a Cyrillic letter resembling an English "p," which can confuse both people and browsers.

Emojis face a hard limit in domains. Illyes said current internet standards do not allow "emojis in the domain name." A 2017 ICANN Board Resolution calls emoji "disallowed by the current technical standards for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)." The resolution notes one exception: certain country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) permit emoji registration at the second level.

The URL path is far more permissive:

• Googlebot will crawl a path containing an emoji, and "our system will actually process it," Illyes said.
• Browsers percent-encode such characters; the episode's chicken emoji becomes %F0%9F%90%94.
• Not every browser or social app displays the emoji. Some show "a string of gibberish" instead.

Google's URL structure documentation already covers the path side. It recommends percent encoding for non-ASCII characters and uses an emoji in one of its own examples. Sites already following that document need no changes.

Do keywords in URLs affect rankings?

Barely, according to Illyes. He called URL keywords "an incredibly small signal" and said: "It really only matters when we have absolutely nothing else to go on." His example: a site seconds old with no content. Once Google sees actual content, keywords in the domain and URL "become basically irrelevant," he said.

This tracks with prior Google statements. John Mueller called URL keywords a "very small ranking factor" in 2016 and a "very very lightweight factor" in 2021.

On separators, Illyes said Google treats underscore-joined words in a URL path "as one long word." That is sometimes fine, because Google may still parse the words. Google recommends hyphens as the common separator. Its documentation gives the same advice and cites "historical reasons": underscores often mark concepts meant to stay together, such as function names in programming.

What should marketers take from this?

The episode gives agencies on-record ammunition against keyword-stuffed URLs. Illyes indicated such URLs carry value only when Google knows nothing else about a page. The episode's closing recap tells viewers directly to stop trying to game search results with keyword-heavy URLs.

The comments section under each video doubles as a submission forum for edge cases not covered in official documentation.

The next episode covers robots.txt. Neither video description publishes a release schedule, and the trailer and first episode appeared eight days apart, so marketers watching for the robots.txt guidance should expect an irregular cadence.