A good slug is short, lowercase, uses hyphens between words and describes the page. Google recommends hyphens rather than underscores because it treats hyphens as word separators. Accents are converted to plain letters (é → e, ß → ss) and symbols removed; Arabic and other non-Latin letters are kept, since modern browsers display them correctly.
Once a page is published, avoid changing its slug. If you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old address so you keep its links and rankings.
Good to know
Truncation happens at a word boundary where possible.
Non-Latin scripts are not transliterated.
Frequently asked questions
What is a URL slug?
The part of a web address after the domain that identifies a page, such as best-cafes-dubai in example.com/blog/best-cafes-dubai.
Should slugs include stopwords?
Removing small words like "the" and "of" makes slugs shorter, but keep them if the slug reads strangely without them.
Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines treat them as spaces between words.
