What Is a URL Slug?
A URL slug is the human-readable identifier at the end of a URL path. In anonymiz.com/url-slugs-seo-permalink-best-practices, the slug is url-slugs-seo-permalink-best-practices. A good slug is descriptive, concise and contains your primary keyword.
Hyphens vs Underscores
Always use hyphens (-) as word separators, never underscores (_). Google has confirmed it treats hyphens as word separators — so hide-ip-address is read as three separate words. Underscores are treated as word joiners — hide_ip_address is read as one long word, harming your keyword targeting.
Should You Remove Stopwords?
Stopwords are common words (a, an, the, and, or, in, on, at, to, for) that add little SEO value. Removing them creates shorter, more focused slugs. "how to hide your ip address" becomes "hide-ip-address" — cleaner and more keyword-rich. However if the stopword is part of a known phrase or brand name, keep it.
How Long Should a Slug Be?
Keep slugs under 60 characters. Google truncates long URLs in search results. The URL should communicate the page topic clearly in as few words as possible. Most best-practice guides recommend 3-5 words for the slug itself.
Why Changing an Existing Slug Is Risky
Every external link, bookmark, and search engine index entry pointing to a URL breaks the moment that URL's slug changes, unless a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one is set up at the same time. Search engines do eventually transfer most of the old URL's ranking signals to the new one through a proper redirect, but there's typically a temporary ranking dip during that transition, which is why changing slugs on already-indexed, already-ranking pages should be a deliberate decision with a redirect plan, not a casual edit.
Slugs Affect Clicks, Not Just Rankings
A clean, readable slug shown in search results can noticeably influence whether someone clicks your result over a competitor's, independent of ranking position — a URL like /hide-ip-address visibly tells a searcher what the page is about before they even read the title, while a URL full of numbers or session parameters offers no such signal and can look less trustworthy. This is a real click-through-rate effect, not just a theoretical SEO best practice, since people do glance at the displayed URL when scanning search results.
Handling Accents and International Characters
Transliterate accented characters to their ASCII equivalents (é→e, ü→u, ñ→n) rather than URL-encoding them. This keeps slugs clean, readable and widely compatible. For example, "Üniversität" should become "universitat" not "%C3%9Cniversit%C3%A4t".
Generate Clean URL Slugs Free
Our URL Slug Generator handles all of the above automatically — accents, stopwords, separator choice and maximum length options — and shows 5 variant formats for each input.
