Should the URL match the title, the keyword, or stay short?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 51
Build it from the topic, in a few words, and do not copy the title. The title is written to win the click and will be rewritten as you test and update the page; the URL is meant to stay the same for the page’s whole life. A slug made of the topic’s core words, such as /sourdough-starter/ for a guide titled “How to Make a Sourdough Starter From Scratch, Even If Yours Keeps Dying”, stays accurate through every title change.
The three options compared
| Option | What you get | The cost |
|---|---|---|
| Copy the full title | A long slug full of filler words and punctuation turned into hyphens | Every title rewrite tempts a URL change, and the slug reads poorly in a shared link |
| Use the target keyword | A descriptive slug that matches how people search | Fine when the keyword is the topic; awkward when it is a long query phrase |
| Keep it short | A slug that is easy to read and share | Fine when it still names the topic; useless when it shrinks to a code or a single vague word |
The best slug takes something from the second and third rows: the words that name the topic, and no more of them than needed.
Google’s guidance
Google’s URL structure guidelines recommend readable words over long ID numbers, words in the audience’s language, and hyphens between words, because hyphens mark word boundaries more clearly than underscores. Its SEO Starter Guide uses /pets/cats.html as the example of a helpful URL. Neither says a URL should match the title or contain an exact phrase.
Writing the slug
- Write the page’s topic in the fewest words a searcher would still recognize.
- Remove words that add nothing, such as “how”, “the”, “best” or the year, unless the page is about that specific thing.
- Use lowercase and hyphens.
- Check that the slug would still be true if the title changed completely.
Once the page is live, leave the slug alone unless it is wrong; for what a change costs, read what happens to rankings when you change a URL slug. Folders are the part of the path above the slug, weighed in whether category folders should appear in the URL. Name the topic in the URL and save the persuasion for the title.
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