The discussion revolves around the issue of emojis in Discourse topic titles affecting the URL, which can be detrimental to SEO. joshm initially raises the concern and is told by Johani that removing emojis from URLs may not be possible, suggesting to disable them altogether.
However, joshm notices that the meta Discourse forum does not change the URL when an emoji is added to the title after the post has been created. Falco explains that using the emoji as :) instead of :slightly_smiling_face: can prevent the URL change.
joshm later finds a workaround by copying and pasting the emoji from a Unicode list, which allows it to appear in the title without affecting the URL.
The conversation escalates to involve codinghorror, sam, and techAPJ, who ultimately decide to strip emoji strings from URLs to maintain parity with other languages and avoid potential issues. A commit has been made to implement this change.
Hi,
I like to add emojis in titles, but after an emoji is added, the url of the post also changes, including the name of the emoji.
For example, if I add the 
emoji, the url changes:
Before: www.example.com/t/nice-title/25
After: www.example.com/t/smile-nice-title/25
This is bad for SEO. Is there anyway to manually edit the URL or to avoid having URLs with emojis?
Thanks!
I’ve just added a emoji to the title of this post, and the url didn’t change. 
How do I achieve this in my installation?
I don’t think removing the emojis from the url is a possibility just yet, but I could be wrong.
While I understand you want to keep the emojis but remove them from urls, if that bothers you so much, you can remove / disable them altogether.
There was a bit of discussion about this here:
Which resulted in a setting to disable emojis in topic titles if that’s what you prefer:
Thanks! I understand.
Anyway, there must be a way to add an emoji in the title, and not change the URL, since in this forum https://meta.discourse.org/ , if you add an emoji in the title, after the post has been created, the URL doesn’t change.
In my install, if I add an emoji to the title, after the post has been created, the URL does changes.
You’re right, I just saw your second post. I will leave this to someone more knowledgeable to answer 
It’s different if you add the emoji as :) or if you add it as :slightly_smiling_face:.
First isn’t added to the URL, while the second will be.
Both URLs will work, and we have a canonical pointing to the, well, canonical URL.
Thanks. Anyway, I think I found an easy solution to my need. I hope this helps someone else:
1- Go to a page containing an unicode list of emojis, like https://emojipedia.org or http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_emoticons.html
2- Copy your emoji and paste it in the title 💷 🐕 💅 💷.
It will still appear in the title but not in the url. You can use many emojis 💷 🐕 💅 💷 
, and not only the basic ones, like :) :(
Note: in the editor and in the preview, they are showing if firefox, but not in chrome browser at least in my computer
@codinghorror this is a bit of a strange inconsistency here, I don’t really mind it that much but you can work around emojis sneaking into slug now by having actual emojis in the title vs :smile: and such.
We need to stop doing this because it hurts non English sites a lot, as previously discussed.
Should we strip emoji from slug unconditionally or just for non-English sites, @techAPJ worked on this last so he can do whatever you think is right here.
For parity with other languages I think we have to strip emoji strings from URLs / titles @techapj – otherwise it is a giant can of :bug:s to untangle that 
The other option is to keep unicode emoji in URLs but do we really want to go there?
aka
http://xn--55gaaaaaa281gfaqg86dja792anqa.org/
Okay, we’ll now strip emoji strings from slug / URL.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/3566c6f02b2d1f3e84ff5cc565a8cbc676124a6b