Descriptive slugs help users and give crawlers a topical hint. Keep them short, lowercase, hyphenated and stable. When a slug must change, redirect the old path with a single 301 and update internal links. Avoid dates, session IDs and uppercase characters that create duplicate URLs.
The extended brief explains when this works, when it does not, and the trade-offs. Join the waitlist and it unlocks for every tip when sign-in opens; MCP access is the paid part.
Crawl the site and flag slugs with uppercase letters, underscores, IDs, dates or more than four path segments. Rank by traffic and inbound links.
Check: The audit lists every non-conforming slug with its traffic and inbound link count.
Change only high-value slugs General best practice
Rewrite slugs that are unreadable or misleading. Keep stable slugs that already rank; the benefit of a cosmetic change is smaller than the redirect risk.
Check: Every changed slug has a matching 301 entry and updated internal links in the same commit.
Verify the redirect and index state
Confirm the old path returns one 301 to the new path and that the new URL is canonical and listed in the sitemap.
Check: curl -sI your production domain/old-slug returns 301 with Location equal to the new slug.
Verify indexing with URL Inspection — URL Inspection shows the indexed version Google holds for one URL: crawl time, selected canonical, status code and blocked resources.
Canonicalize duplicate URLs — Duplicate URLs split signals across protocol, host, slash and parameter variants.
Make JavaScript content crawlable — Google renders JavaScript, but rendering costs time and AI retrieval systems often read raw HTML.