Yoast Generating Sitemaps in Japanese

Browsers often make URLs more readable because they converts encoded characters to real characters (but they internally have to use encoded URLs). If you copy/paste “nice” URL to Notepad (or you use Network inspector) then you will see encoded characters. More details – RFC3986.

I don’t see difference in URLs (between sitemaps and canonical in HTML source). Post sitemap is valid (I don’t see errors) for search engines (and sitemaps have to use encoded characters, otherwise they are invalid). I’m guessing that your issues is related to “human readability” and I think that’s hard to find easy solution. Maybe, it’s possible to create custom XSL which converts URL. There is function str:decode-uri, but I’m not sure for details.

Could you make screenshot of GSC – “Indexed, but not in the SiteMap”? I’ll try to check more details.

Thanks Sasa, appreciate the knowledgeable response.

You are correct that URLs are functionally equivalent. However, the SiteMap is pretty much unreadable. So we can’t do any kind of human verification to see what is in or out of the sitemap.

I believe Yoast could do a better job here of preserving the encoding when writing the sitemap.

Here is a screenshot of the URL used in my example in Google Search Console.

https://www.zodigital.jp/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Japanese_Problem_URL_Inspection.png

This problem has me more concerned. The whole purpose of the sitemap is to point out to Google which pages are available for indexing.

Hello Yoast Team, any updates on this issue?

We could try to create Feature request on github related to “XSL transformation”.

Related to “indexed, not submitted in sitemap”, I don’t see possible issue. An issue which I had with French language is related to “Unicode Normalization Forms” (There are NFC and NFD). It seems that Japanese could be affected – https://medium.com/@yorkxin/apfs-docker-unicode-6e9893c9385d

I’ll try to research more details when I find spare time.

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Thanks for understanding!