“Keywords in Your URL Are an Incredibly Small Signal.” Google Said It Again.

Google published the first video in a series it calls The Non-Canonical Cabinet, with Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin talking about how Search handles URLs. The list of topics reads like a museum of arguments SEOs have had for fifteen years: what can go in a domain name, internationalised domains and Punycode, whether emoji URLs work, hyphens versus underscores, and whether a URL stuffed with keywords makes you rank forever.

Illyes’s answer on keywords was the same as it has been for a decade, stated more bluntly this time: keywords in a URL or a domain are an incredibly small signal and will not do much.

There were a few other answers worth filing away:

• Use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words in a URL path. Underscores are not treated as separators.
• Emoji paths work technically but get percent-encoded, which is a user-experience cost with no upside.
• Google can detect spam patterns in URLs, so a domain or path built purely from keyword stuffing is a liability rather than a lever.

Why this keeps needing to be said

Because slugs are the cheapest thing to change. Renaming a page costs ten minutes and produces a satisfying diff; writing a genuinely better description of your product takes an afternoon and produces no visible change at all. Given a choice, teams optimise the cheap thing and call it progress.

The result is the familiar pattern: a site with immaculate URL structure — short, hyphenated, keyword-bearing — and a third-party footprint that describes it with the word “solutions.”

Where the effort actually pays

If the URL is a rounding error, what is not? The signals that describe you in places you do not own, because that is where the description is written in someone else’s words — which is what both search engines and language models use to decide what you are.

Nothing in the top row has ever changed a small business’s trajectory. The middle rows have.

A test you can run in five minutes

Search your brand name. Then read the first ten results that are not yours, and try to answer one question: would a stranger reading those ten pages be able to say what your product does, and for whom?

If the answer is no — if the descriptions are taglines, or missing, or contradict each other — then the problem is not your URL structure, and no slug rewrite will touch it. The fix is to write those descriptions yourself, one platform at a time, and put them where third parties will host them.

Which is the reason to hand off the mechanics rather than do them badly. https://backlinksubmit.org matches platforms to a product from a handpicked list of directories and communities, and the submissions are written by hand rather than generated from one template — so the copy that ends up describing you is at least copy someone composed. The description itself still has to come from whoever knows the product. What changes is that it has to be written down once per platform instead of never.

What to do with the URLs you already have

Three things, then stop.

Use hyphens, keep it short, and don’t change what works. Never rename a URL that ranks and has links unless you have a reason unrelated to keywords.

Make the slug human-readable. It appears in search results and in shared links. Readability is for the human, not for the algorithm.

Ignore everything else. Keyword order, pluralisation, the presence of a category prefix — none of it is worth a meeting.

The more useful version of this article’s headline is the inverse: your URL is not the problem. Almost every small site that feels invisible has a description problem, not a slug problem.

FAQ

Is it worth putting keywords in the URL at all?

Google describes it as an incredibly small signal. Use readable, hyphen-separated words for human reasons; do not expect the keywords to do ranking work.

Hyphens or underscores?

Hyphens. Underscores are not treated as word separators in URL paths.

Will a keyword-rich domain help me rank?

Same answer as the path: the signal is minimal, and Google has said it can detect spam patterns in domains and URLs.

Should I rename old URLs to include keywords?

Generally no. You would take on redirect risk for a negligible gain, and the time would be better spent writing the descriptions that appear on the platforms that describe you.