Transliteration for SEO-friendly URLs and documents

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CSV opens in Excel and Google Sheets: the separator is a semicolon, and the file starts with an encoding marker; otherwise Excel displays Cyrillic as gibberish. The first 1000 rows are processed.

• Yandex-style — the informal name for a simple set without service marks. No apostrophes, grave accents or the letter x. This is how addresses are written on the Russian web.
• Google-style — the same set, but with three different letters: х becomes kh, ц becomes ts and щ becomes shch. This is exactly how Google Translate transliterates them.
• GOST 7.79-2000, system B — no diacritics, but reversible: ы is written as y with a grave accent, ь with a grave accent and ъ with two grave accents. Ц becomes c before е, и, й and ы; elsewhere it becomes cz.
• ISO 9, system A — also called system A of the same GOST: one letter for one, with diacritics. The standard for bibliographies and catalogs; for an address, the diacritics have to be removed.
• International passport — Order No. 996 of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Order No. 4271 of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs use the same table, which is also ICAO Doc 9303. Since 2014, this is how names are written in passports.
• GOST R 52535.1-2006 — the passport scheme used before 2014. It differs from the current one in two places: ц becomes tc, and the hard sign is not transliterated at all. Use it when checking spelling against an older document.

How to use it

1. Enter a heading. If you have several headings, enter them one per line: URLs for all of them will be generated at once, and the «List by line» section will display them in a table and mark duplicates.

2. Choose a scheme. Use the Yandex or Google scheme for page URLs, and GOST 7.79-2000 or the passport scheme under Order No. 996 of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for documents. The text below the switch explains how the selected scheme differs from the neighboring ones.

3. Fill in «Domain and path» if you need a complete URL rather than just a slug, and choose an ending—a slash or .html. The result will then be copied in a form you can paste directly into the address field.

4. Select what to remove. Stop words and prepositions do not belong in a URL, while symbols are best converted to words: «Цена +20%» would otherwise lose both the plus sign and the percentage sign. Both lists can be edited directly in the fields.

5. You can edit ambiguous letters manually: ё, й, х, ц, щ, э, and the signs ъ and ь. While «by scheme» is selected, the value comes from the chosen table; any other value overrides it.

6. Get the result: «Copy all URLs», «Download CSV» for the table, or «Download as list» for a text file. Settings are saved, while «Reset settings» restores the original values independently of the text.

7. Reverse translation is available in the «Back to Cyrillic» section. It is exact for GOST 7.79-2000 and ISO 9, but only an approximation for the Yandex and Google schemes: й and ы are written with the same letter, so they cannot be reconstructed unambiguously.

The formula and what it includes

• Order matters — Symbols are converted to words before transliteration; otherwise the plus sign and percentage sign would simply disappear: URLs allow only Latin letters and digits. Stop words are removed after translation, so comparison is easier in Latin.
• The cz and c rule — In system B of GOST 7.79-2000, the letter ц before е, и, й, and ы is written as c; everywhere else, it is written as cz. Thus, «цены» becomes ceny`, while «цвет» becomes czvet. Manually editing the value for ц overrides this rule: the selected value is used everywhere.
• Trimming at a word boundary — Words are added to the slug one at a time while space remains. A word that does not fit in full is not added at all—cutting a word in the middle produces an unreadable fragment. Separators count toward the length.
• Reversibility — Only GOST 7.79-2000 system B and ISO 9 system A can be reversed unambiguously: each Russian letter has its own representation. In the Yandex and Google schemes, й and ы both produce y; in the passport scheme, и and й both produce i. Reverse translation therefore infers the result from neighboring letters: й is inserted after a vowel, and ы or и after a consonant.
• Duplicate URL — Two different headings that produced the same slug. On a website, this means either one page overwrites another or the URL gets a number appended. These lines are marked in the table.

Example breakdown: «Как выбрать щебень: цены и объём»

The input data is the same as the default field values: you can calculate it mentally and confirm that the tool is telling the truth.

• The text «Как выбрать щебень: цены и объём» — 32 characters, one line, 6 words, 26 Cyrillic letters
• Yandex scheme, hyphen separator, all lowercase, no ending
• Stop words, symbols as words, and similar letters enabled; length limit: 70 characters

1. There are no symbols or foreign letters in the line, so the first two steps do not change it.

2. The Yandex scheme produces Kak vybrat scheben: ceny i obem. Щ becomes sch, ъ and ь disappear, and ё becomes e.

3. Colons and spaces become word boundaries, and everything is converted to lowercase: kak, vybrat, scheben, ceny, i, obem.

4. Two stop words match the list: «как» and «и». They are removed, leaving four words.

5. The length is 24 characters, so the limit of 70 is not reached and nothing needs to be trimmed. No domain is set, so the URL contains one slug.

URL: vybrat-scheben-ceny-obem — 24 characters. Without removing stop words, it would be kak-vybrat-scheben-ceny-i-obem, 30 characters. Under GOST 7.79-2000, the same text produces vybrat-shheben-ceny-obyom.

Frequently asked questions

• Which scheme should I use for page URLs?

  The Yandex or Google scheme—they differ in three letters: х as h or kh, ц as c or ts, and щ as sch or shch. GOST 7.79-2000 was created for reversibility: the string ceny` uniquely reconstructs «цены». But a grave accent and apostrophe cannot be used in an address, so they must be stripped anyway, and reversibility is immediately lost. Use GOST or the passport scheme for documents, and either of the first two for addresses.

• Why is it written differently in a foreign passport?

  Because it has its own table: Order No. 996 of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, also known as ICAO Doc 9303. In this scheme, х becomes kh, ц becomes ts, щ becomes shch, ъ becomes ie, ю becomes iu, and я becomes ia. The tool supports this scheme: select «Foreign passport». If you are checking an older document issued before 2014, use GOST R 52535.1-2006—there, ц is written as tc, and ъ is omitted entirely.

• Can I translate back from Latin to Cyrillic?

  For GOST 7.79-2000 system B and ISO 9 system A—yes, exactly. In these schemes, each Russian letter has its own representation; that is why they retain grave accents and diacritics. With the Yandex, Google, and passport schemes, reverse translation cannot be unambiguous: й and ы are written with the same letter. The tool will still parse such a string, but it has to infer the result from neighboring letters, and it will say so clearly.

• Why remove prepositions from a URL?

  People read URLs with their eyes and paste them into emails, so shorter is better. Prepositions and conjunctions do not add meaning: kak-vybrat-scheben-ceny-i-obem and vybrat-scheben-ceny-obem lead to the same page and say the same thing, but the second is six characters shorter. The stop-word list can be edited: if a word matters in your case, remove it from the list.

• What happens to letters from other languages?

  When «Replace similar letters» is enabled, Ukrainian і, ї, є, ґ, Belarusian ў, German umlauts and ß, and Polish, Czech, Kazakh, and Serbian letters are replaced with similar Latin letters: і becomes i, ї becomes yi, є becomes ye, and ß becomes ss. If you disable the option or a letter outside this list is found, the notes will show exactly which letters were not translated—not a count, but the letters themselves. The «Replace foreign letters in text» button rewrites them directly in the field so the correction remains in the source text.

• Hyphen or underscore?

  In practice, the hyphen has become the standard and is used by default. The underscore is available for cases where the URL must match a file name or an existing project convention. Dots and joined words appear in older systems. The key point is not to mix different separators within one project.

• Why are two lines marked as duplicates?

  Because they produced the same URL. This happens when headings differ only in punctuation, capitalization, or removed prepositions: «Цены на щебень» and «Цены, щебень» produce the same result. On a website, that means either one page overwrites another or the URL gets a number appended at the end. Fix the heading or slug instead of leaving it as is.

• Should I change the URL of a page that is already live?

  Changing a URL creates a new page. The old URL stops working, and links to it lead nowhere. If you must change it, set a permanent redirect from the old URL to the new one and do not delete the old URL.