Keywords in URL: what Google says, what studies measured, how to write one

Do keywords in a URL help SEO? Google's SEO Starter Guide (updated 10 December 2025) answers in one sentence: "From a ranking perspective, the keywords in the name of the domain (or URL path) alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs." So the words in a URL are there for the person reading it: in the search result, in the address bar and wherever the URL is pasted as a link. This page sets out what Google's own pages say, the documented rules for writing a URL, what two dated studies measured, what it costs to change a URL that already exists, and what happens when the URL itself is the link text. For the wider picture of crawling, indexing and ranking, read how a search engine works.

What Google's own pages say about keywords in a URL

The sources in this section are Google's own published material, read on 4 October 2026.

Google's SEO Starter Guide says keywords in a domain name or URL path have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs, and that sentence is Google's direct statement on URL keywords. The same guide explains where the words in a URL do show: "Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them." And on how those breadcrumbs are produced: "Google learns breadcrumbs automatically based on the words in the URL, but you can also influence them with structured data if you like a technical challenge."

The Google Search Central SEO office hours for April 2024, transcript last updated 18 April 2024, answered a question about word separators in the same vein: "Well, keywords in URLs have barely any contribution to the rankings of your pages in Google's search results, but yeah, it does matter what you use as separators, and hyphens are better in some sense because it's clearer that they're separating words." The hyphen advice also has its own row in the rules table further down this page.

One further page matters for anyone who marks up breadcrumbs. Google's breadcrumb structured data page (updated 8 September 2026) advises: "We recommend providing breadcrumbs that represent a typical user path to a page, instead of mirroring the URL structure." The trail should describe how a visitor moves through the site, not copy the folders in the address.

The Starter Guide and the office hours answer say the same thing in different words, and both leave the same practical point: a URL is written for the reader. The words in it help a person decide whether to click and whether the page is likely to answer their question. Choosing which words belong on the page at all is keyword research for on-site SEO, a separate job that comes before any slug is written.

How to write a URL: the documented rules

Each rule below is Google's own wording from its URL structure page, updated 10 December 2025 and read on 4 October 2026.

On case, the same page explains that Google's URL handling is case sensitive, giving the example of /APPLE and /apple being treated as two distinct URLs with their own content. To add a keyword to a URL, write the words a reader would search for in lower case and join them with hyphens. A properly optimised URL that follows the rules in the table reads like this:

example.com/red-running-shoes

The same words written against two of those rules look like this:

example.com/Red_Running_Shoes

For larger sites, the Starter Guide adds a note on folders. It applies, in the guide's words, to sites with more than a few thousand URLs: "Specifically, using directories (or folders) to group similar topics can help Google learn how often the URLs in individual directories change."

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines (no date printed; read on 4 October 2026) list duplicate content and URLs with numerous parameters among the things to keep away from, so that Bingbot can crawl and render a site efficiently.

Length, stop words and dates in a slug are choices to make for the reader's sake.

What two dated studies measured

Two recent studies counted what sits in the URLs of pages that rank. Both are counts on their own samples, and neither is a statement of cause.

Suff Digital published a keyword-in-URL study on 24 September 2026, with the data collected on 23 September 2026. The sample was Google US desktop results for 20,000 US keywords, covering 166,403 top-10 results. Its central finding: "Pages ranking first on Google have the full keyword in their web address 27.3% of the time, no more often than pages at positions 2 to 6, which range from 27.2% to 27.7%."

In the same sample, 14.7% of first-place pages used the exact keyword as the URL slug. Split by intent, the first-place match rate was 37% for informational searches, 31.9% for navigational and 21.6% for transactional. And 53.5% of first-place results for two-word keywords had both words in the address, against 7.2% for keywords of five or more words. In that sample, the measure is whether every word of the search appears anywhere in the web address, domain included, in any order. The study compared that rate by position, intent and keyword length, and most of the figures above are for the first-place result. It is a count of what the addresses hold, not a measure of what the words do.

seo-kreativ.de's URL length study by Christian Ott measured length rather than keywords. It was published on 22 June 2026 and updated on 19 September 2026, with results collected on 26 and 27 May 2026 from google.de: 27,291 results filtered to 22,250 top-10 rows across 2,862 keywords. Its headline: "Per 50 additional URL characters, the position worsens by roughly 0.3 places". The study states its own limit: "Model explains under 2 % of position variance".

It also reports that controlling for page type and other confounders shrinks the apparent advantage of shorter URLs by 35.9 %. These are German results, and the measure is URL length.

One study counted keyword matches on US desktop results; the other measured length on German results. Each figure belongs to its own sample.

Should you change a URL that already exists?

Change a URL that already exists only when the current address misleads the reader or is broken. Changing a live URL is a site move in miniature, and the documentation treats it that way. Google's page on moving a site with URL changes (updated 20 August 2026, read on 4 October 2026) sets the expectation: "Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move." On timing, the same page says that for a medium-sized website it can take a few weeks or more for Google to gradually start showing the new URLs instead of the old ones, and even longer for a larger site.

The same page covers the redirect itself: "301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank." And: "Avoid chaining redirects." Google's redirects page (updated 14 April 2026) states what a permanent redirect does: "Permanent redirects: Show the new redirect target in search results." A 301 is one of the HTTP status codes a server can return. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines also ask for 301 redirects for permanent URL changes, and add: "Stable URLs support long-term visibility and continuity."

Two practitioners have published what happened when they changed URLs on their own sites.

Spencer Thomas of Podium Design, a web design and SEO business, wrote up his own site's migration on 6 May 2026: "In April this year I changed roughly 30 page URLs on my own website." What followed: "Half my Sussex location rankings disappeared for two weeks. Pages that had been ranking position 8 dropped to position 40."

He writes that the usual advice, recovery within two to four weeks, held roughly for half of his pages; the other half took six to eight weeks, and three had not fully recovered when he wrote. His account ends: "Six weeks after the migration started, my position numbers are better than they were before." This is one site, and the change was a restructure of folders, not a test of adding keywords to URLs.

Dave Ashworth, a freelance SEO consultant, changed the URLs of 27 service and skills pages on his own site at the end of November to add the words consultant or consultancy. He left titles, headings and content as they were, put 301 redirects in place, and compared 1 December to 31 March in Search Console against the previous comparable period. He reports an increase in impressions for the searches he was aiming at, and he adds his own limit: "Of course, this wasn’t a controlled laboratory experiment and other external ranking factors still exist."

A short checklist:

1. Change a URL only when the current one misleads a reader or is broken.
2. Put one permanent redirect from the old URL straight to the new one, with no chain.
3. Update the site's internal links to the new URL; our notes on internal link building cover that job.
4. Expect movement for some weeks, and read the same Search Console report before and after.

When the URL is the link text

This is where the words in a URL do a visible job. When another site links to a page and uses the bare address as the anchor, often called a naked URL, the words in the URL are the only words inside the link.

Google's page "Link best practices for Google" (updated 10 December 2025, read on 4 October 2026) describes what anchor text does: "This text tells people and Google something about the page you're linking to." And what good anchor text looks like: "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to."

Linkody, a backlink monitoring tool, reported in June 2026 that of more than 865,000 backlinks its users track, 15% were naked URLs. The figure describes that tool's tracked links, not the whole web.

A readable slug means a pasted link still tells the reader what is behind it. Words taken from the page, in the reader's language, joined by hyphens, do that work in a forum post, an email or a document, long after the page itself was written. Our anchor text guide covers anchor text more widely.

What we check on an order's target URL

Our own interest in URLs is practical. On Curated Links, the buyer gives us the target URL and the anchor text, so the address is part of the order.

Before a placement goes out, we check the HTTP status code the target URL returns: no dead pages, no redirect chains. We expect anchors to be no longer than several words, and we often find branded and partial anchors the most suitable.

After publication, we check that the page is live, that the link sits in the body copy, that the anchor and target URL match the order and that the page is indexable. Only then is the URL reported to the dashboard. The full list sits on the page for our QA checks.

One practical point follows from our check for redirect chains. If a URL is about to change, change it before ordering links to it, so the link points at the final address rather than at a redirect.

Frequently asked questions

Do keywords in the URL help SEO?

Google's SEO Starter Guide, updated 10 December 2025, says the keywords in a domain name or URL path alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs. The words in a URL are written for the reader: the guide says parts of a URL can be shown as breadcrumbs in search results, and the words are what a reader sees wherever the address is pasted as a link.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?

Hyphens. Google's URL structure page, updated 10 December 2025, recommends hyphens rather than underscores to separate words, saying this helps users and search engines identify the concepts in the URL. Google's April 2024 SEO office hours gave the same advice: hyphens make it clearer that the words are separate.

How long should a URL be?

Google's URL structure page says to shorten URLs by trimming parameters that do not change the content. In seo-kreativ.de's study of google.de results, positions worsened by roughly 0.3 places for each 50 additional characters, in a model that explains under 2% of position variance. Write the URL as short as it can be while staying readable.

Should URLs be lower case?

Keep one case throughout. Google's URL structure page says Google Search's URL handling is case sensitive and gives the example of /APPLE and /apple being treated as two distinct URLs, and it advises converting all text to one case where the web server treats upper and lower case alike.

Should I change my old URLs to add keywords?

Only when the current URL misleads a reader or is broken. Google's site-move page says to expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during a move, and on one web designer's own site, pages dropped from position 8 to position 40 for a time. If a URL does change, use one permanent redirect from the old address straight to the new one, with no chain.

What else moves a page up in search?

This page covers the URL only: how to write one, what two studies measured and what it costs to change one. For the wider job, see our guide on how to improve Google ranking.