Google Says Keywords in URLs Barely Matter. Here's How to Write URLs That Actually Help
On-Page SEO
Step-by-step
Keywords in URLs
Trigger Marketing
The Trigger team
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Somewhere out there is a page called best-cheap-affordable-web-design-company-near-me-top-rated-2026.
Its owner thinks that's genius. Google thinks it's a cry for help.
On Oct 14, 2026, Google's Gary Illyes said keywords in a domain or URL are "an incredibly small signal." Once a page has content, it's "basically irrelevant." So let's write URLs for the people who actually read them.
Quick words (one line each):
URL: the web address of a page.
Domain: the main name of the site, like yoursite.com.
Slug: the last part of the URL, like /blog/fix-your-sitemap.
Redirect: an automatic forward from an old address to a new one.
Punycode: the behind-the-scenes code (starting with xn--) that domains in other alphabets get turned into.
What Google actually said
From Google Search Central's "What can you actually put in a URL" (Oct 14, 2026), with Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin:
Keywords in the URL are "an incredibly small signal." They only matter when Google has nothing else, like a brand-new empty page.
The part after .com can hold almost anything: any language, emoji, lots of symbols. Googlebot crawls it. Browsers turn it into percent-codes that look like gibberish.
Gibberish URLs look bad in link previews and some apps, so people don't click.
Hyphens, not underscores. Google treats words joined with underscores as one long word.
Simple, descriptive words win. A clean URL builds trust, and some people use the address bar to see where they are on a site.
Gary's recap, word for word: "stop trying to hack the search results with long keyword-stuffed URLs." And: "It's 2026."
Step 1: Keep the domain boring
Letters, numbers and hyphens. Domain rules come from ICANN and internet standards, not Google.
No emoji. They're not allowed in domain names.
No look-alike letters. A Cyrillic letter that looks like an English "p" confuses people and browsers.
Spellable. If people can't spell your domain, they can't find you (Google, Oct 14, 2026).
Step 2: Write the slug for a human
Joost de Valk's Website Specification (checked Nov 1, 2026) gives the same rules:
Lowercase.
Hyphens between words. "Search engines tokenise on hyphens but not underscores."
Descriptive. Say what the page is.
Shallow. 3 or fewer folders deep.
No dates that go stale. /2024/best-tools ages badly.
Step 3: Run the read-it-out-loud test
Cover the domain. Read only the slug.
Good: /fix-your-sitemap-what-google-actually-reads. You know exactly what you'll get.
Bad: /p?id=8841&cat=7. Nobody knows. Nobody clicks.
Also bad: the keyword-stuffed monster at the top of this post.
Local business? A city name in the slug is fine when it tells the reader what the page is. Just say it once.
Step 4: Don't rename working URLs
Here's where people burn a weekend: they rename 40 old pages to "add keywords."
Gary Illyes just told you the ranking gain is basically zero once a page has content. Every rename costs you a redirect and a cleanup job. Leave working URLs alone. Use the good rules on new pages.
Step 5: Check your symbols
No emoji or special symbols in client URLs, even though they technically work.
Paste a URL into a chat app or social post. If the preview turns it into %F0%9F soup, fix it before launch.
Step 6: Spend the time where it counts
That hour you saved not renaming URLs? Put it into the title tag, the H1 and the first paragraph. Those are what people and AI actually read.
Do this today
Open your 5 most important pages.
Read each slug out loud with the domain covered.
Swap any underscores for hyphens on new pages only.
Delete "keyword-stuffed" from your plans for good.
Leave working old URLs exactly where they are.
Related reading
Sources
Don't worry if this seems like it's a pain in the ass for someone who doesn't build websites. That's because it is. The good news: just click the link below, pull the trigger, and we'll take care of the rest.
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