Weird One Character Domain Superstore

@jonroig this is absolutely incredible — any idea how this works with SEO?

@suparchie Do you mean... the domains or the site itself? Unicode domains are indexed and displayed correctly -- I think? -- by google, but you have to be careful if you're using both a "regular" domain and a unicode domain. Basically, if they share content, google really wants to combine them into a single canonical site. In most cases, that's going to be the "regular" domain, since that probably gets better usage. As far as I can tell, outside of https://i❤️.ws, not too many sites have gone all in on a unicode / idn domain. Most people use them for forwarding, since they don't want the address to display in punycode... but even that's complicated, since urls like https://ツ.ws don't display as punycode in Chrome, at least not for now.

@suparchie Hey... just to follow up, with a few thoughts. I misspoke when I said that not too many sites have gone all in on IDN - there are actually tons of them, I just don't think about it because I'm an English speaker. There are, like, all these other languages out there... ya know? In general, though, IDN / Unicode domains are handled well by all the search engines. I've been experimenting pretty heavily with https://i❤️.ws, but here are the results of my last look at emoji search results: https://medium.com/@Emoji_Domain... I don't have a ton of good examples to show off since this is all kind of dubious, but since emoji domains are the main focus of my efforts, do a google search for "emoji domains" and you'll see what the search results look like....

@emoji_domains @jonroig Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply to your previous response! What a fantastic follow-up -- thank you so much. I'm really interested in using a unicode domain for an upcoming project (to sort of define it) but was holding off for SEO reasons. Thanks for such a through reply dude hugely appreciated. 🙏

@emoji_domains @suparchie Let me know if you build something cool!

@w Hey... thanks! It's a deeply silly and stupid project, but I learned a lot doing it. Most of that research I plowed back into my "main" side gig, i❤️.ws. But... you know... once you start going down a rabbit hole with this unicode stuff, you end up in some weird places. Here's the obligatory "How I Built This" article: http://hackernoon.com/weirdonech...

@hassanz75 Security is definitely a concern with IDNs / Unicode domains... and the browsers are on the front lines of that. Theoretically, anything with confusable characters should default to punycode in the address bar. Practically, that's still an issue.

@jonroig True and sorry I should have mentioned that this issue is not part of the product this page is about but allowing the 'weird characters' to be used in the domain name. I hope that browsers and anti-virus application will soon start educating users about it.