Hi all,

I have searched in vain for a concrete answer to this question.

If you're dealing with the hreflang tags yourself (i.e. don't use automation plugins etc.), is it okay if the URLs (e.g. in Japanese) remain unencrypted?

Example (not encoded):
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="https://domain. com/エグザイルリンク/" />

The same encoded:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja" href="https://domain. com/%e3%82%a8%e3%82%b0%e3%82%b6%e3%82%a4%e3%83%ab%e3%83%aa%e3%83%b3%e3%82%af" />

When checking the unencoded tags in hreflang checkers, they don't seem to have a problem with this (they don't flag any issues).

Also on other websites I see both approaches with unencoded and encoded hreflang variants.

What is your opinion on this, could there be conflicts and/or is there a best practice?

Thanks all

Hello there,

Thanks for your suggestions and sorry for the late response. In fact, I also left an inquiry with the Bing Webmaster Tools mail support (I did not even realise they offered this service), and they answered within one day.

They confirmed that the site runs without any errors and that the sitemap has now been submitted successfully. Upon checking I can confirm this (the sitemaps URLs have finally been submitted). Therefore, all is in order now.

I still do not understand why prior to this the JA sitemap URLs were not being submitted (for weeks), even though I tried to make Bing Webmaster Tools re-crawl it by re-submitting the sitemap.

In any case, I guess this is one of these episodes where the problem simply fixed itself. Kudos to their support though...

Thanks everyone

Hello everyone,

I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points:

• The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ )

• The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji.

• Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed).

When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either.

My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this.

When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded.

I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps?

Many thanks everyone for any advice!