Gerk Mulder shared an interesting screen shot on Twitter of Google indexing, ranking and displaying in the search results snippet a globe unicode URL. It looks like this 🌐 and I tried to use it in the URL of this post to see what happens with it (I might remove it if my CMS breaks it).
Here is a screen shot of the search result snippet:
The funny thing is that a WhatsApp engineer coded it this way on purpose and surprise, surprise, Google indexed it.
Google does index and rank unicode, just never seen it used like this.
Who needs hreflang if you can just encode your URLs with 🌐 and Google can use that. That would be fun.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
