---
title: "Use descriptive URL slugs"
description: "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."
url: "https://seo-mcp.io/t/use-descriptive-url-slugs"
---

# Use descriptive URL slugs

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.

## Prerequisites

- Control over routing or CMS permalink settings

## Steps

1. **Audit existing slugs** *(general best practice)* — 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.
2. **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.
3. **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.

## Source

@seo-mcp on 2026-10-19: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide

Canonical: https://seo-mcp.io/t/use-descriptive-url-slugs