What Makes a Good URL Slug
A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in human-readable form — for example, in calquto.com/tools/mortgage-calculator, "mortgage-calculator" is the slug. Clean slugs improve both SEO and user experience, since they're readable in browser tabs, shareable links, and search result previews.
Search engines treat the words in a slug as a ranking signal, which is why including target keywords in your slug (without overstuffing) can modestly help search visibility compared to using auto-generated IDs or dates alone.
Slug Best Practices
- Use hyphens, not underscores — Google treats hyphens as word separators but sometimes treats underscores as joining words together, making hyphens the SEO-preferred choice.
- Keep it short and descriptive — aim for 3-5 words that clearly describe the page content without unnecessary filler.
- Remove stop words — words like "a," "the," and "of" rarely add value to a slug and only make it longer.
- Always lowercase — mixed-case URLs can cause duplicate content issues since some servers treat them as case-sensitive.
- Avoid changing slugs after publishing — changing a URL slug breaks existing links and requires a 301 redirect to preserve SEO value.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do slugs actually affect SEO rankings? ▼
Yes, modestly — a descriptive, keyword-relevant slug is considered a minor ranking signal and helps with click-through rates since users can see the topic in the URL within search results. It's a small factor compared to content quality and backlinks, but worth optimizing since it costs nothing to do well.
Should I include numbers or dates in my slug? ▼
Generally avoid dates in slugs for evergreen content, since "2024" in a URL can make an article look outdated even after you update the content. Numbers are fine when they're meaningful to the topic itself, like "10-best-tools" for a listicle.
What happens if I change a slug after the page is already indexed? ▼
Changing a slug breaks the old URL, which can hurt SEO and break external links pointing to it, unless you set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves most of the accumulated SEO value while pointing visitors to the updated address.
Related Calculators