What a slug is and what makes a good one
The slug is the part of a URL that names one page, such as uae-gratuity-example in example.com/guides/uae-gratuity-example. Google's guidance on URL structure asks for simple, descriptive words that people can understand, preferably in the language of your readers, and suggests hyphens between words rather than underscores, because hyphens help both people and search engines see where one word ends. A good slug is short, says what the page is about, has no dates or IDs that will look stale, and never changes once the page is published.
Arabic slugs: keep the Arabic or use Latin letters
Arabic URLs are allowed. Google's own guidelines show an Arabic address as an example and only ask that links in your HTML use the percent-encoded form, which browsers produce for you. The choice is about readers. An Arabic slug reads naturally in search results and in the address bar for an Arabic audience. When it is pasted into some email programs or chat apps, though, it can appear as long strings like %D8%AF%D8%A8%D9%8A, because each Arabic letter is sent as six characters. A Latin slug stays short and looks the same everywhere, but a transliteration can be hard to recognise. Pick one style for the whole site and keep it.
How Arabic text is cleaned
In Keep in Arabic mode the generator removes every diacritic (fatha, damma, kasra, tanween, shadda, sukun and the dagger alef), removes tatweel, and turns أ, إ, آ and ٱ into a plain ا, because most people type without the hamza. Persian look-alike letters (ک and ی) become their Arabic forms, ligatures such as ﻻ are split into normal letters, Arabic-Indic digits like ١٠ become 10, and the Arabic comma, semicolon and question mark separate words. Taa marbuta (ة) and alef maqsura (ى) are kept as typed, since changing them would change the spelling. Optional stop-word removal drops short words such as في، من and على.
The Latin letter scheme
Latin mode uses a plain ASCII scheme, close to how Gulf names are usually written in English, instead of the academic systems with dots and lines over letters that do not belong in a URL. Each letter has one spelling, listed below. Arabic script normally leaves out short vowels, so an unvowelled word is spelled letter by letter: خبز becomes khbz, while a word written with its vowel marks, such as مُحَمَّد, becomes muhammad. A short list of well-known names is spelled the familiar way: دبي dubai, أبوظبي abu-dhabi, الرياض riyadh, محمد muhammad. For an important page you can still type your own English slug.
- ا a · أ a · إ i · آ aa · ء (dropped) · ب b · ت t · ث th · ج j · ح h · خ kh
- د d · ذ dh · ر r · ز z · س s · ش sh · ص s · ض d · ط t · ظ z
- ع a · غ gh · ف f · ق q · ك k · ل l · م m · ن n · ه h · ة a
- و u, or w at the start of a word or after a vowel · ي i, or y in the same places · ى a
- ال at the start of a word becomes al- (العين al-ain) · a shadda doubles its letter · fatha a, damma u, kasra i
Length limits and bulk lists
Many systems limit a slug by its encoded length, not by what you see. WordPress, for example, stores the post slug percent-encoded in a field of 200 characters, which is room for only about 33 Arabic letters. That is why the length limit can count encoded characters, and why the preview shows both lengths. Bulk mode takes one title per line, numbers repeated slugs so every URL stays unique, and exports a UTF-8 CSV with the title, slug, URL, encoded URL and its length. Titles that start with = or + are prefixed so a spreadsheet does not run them as formulas.