SEO Friendly URLs: Hyphens Yes, Renaming Everything No

Google spent part of October talking about URLs. Not AI, not a core update, not a new robot. The little address bar text that nobody reads unless it’s broken.

And the news is mostly good, which is rare enough that I’m writing it down.

The short version

• Google still recommends hyphens between words in a URL, not underscores. It reads an underscore phrase as one long word.
• Google’s own Gary Illyes called keywords in URLs “an incredibly small signal.” Once Google can read your page, the URL words barely matter.
• The real way to hurt yourself with URLs is renaming them without redirects. Leave working URLs alone.

What did Google actually change about URLs?

Almost nothing, and that’s the point. On October 21, Google reworded the hyphens section of its URL structure best practices, and the advice stayed the same: use hyphens to separate words, skip underscores, and don’t mash words together with no separator at all.

The new wording just explains it better. Underscores are usually used to keep things together (programmers name stuff like format_date), while hyphens clearly mark where one word ends and the next begins. A week earlier, Google’s Search Central team kicked off a video series called The Non-Canonical Cabinet, and the first episode was entirely about what you can put in a URL. That’s where the quotable stuff came from.

So no, there’s no new rule to panic about. Somebody will still try to sell you a “URL optimization package” this week. Keep your wallet in your pocket.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in my URLs?

Hyphens. According to Illyes, Google treats words joined by underscores as one long word, so /drain_cleaning_palm_coast/ reads like a single made up word instead of four real ones.

I see this all the time on older sites and in image file names. Somebody uploads IMG_4482_FINAL_final2.jpg, the site makes a URL out of it, and now the page about your best product lives at an address that looks like a ransom note. It’s not a disaster. It’s just sloppy, and sloppy adds up.

The fix going forward is easy: lowercase words, hyphens between them, no dates, no ID numbers, nothing that looks like a password. WordPress does most of this for you if you let it.

Do keywords in a URL still help SEO?

Barely. Illyes said keywords in URLs only matter when Google has “absolutely nothing else to go on,” and once it can see the actual content they’re basically irrelevant.

This is the part I like, because I’ve watched business owners lose sleep over whether their service page should be /services/plumbing/ or /plumber-palm-coast-fl-best-affordable/. The second one isn’t helping. It’s just long. Google reads the page. The page is what has to be good.

Where readable URLs still earn their keep is with people. A clean URL looks trustworthy when someone texts it to a friend, it tells you what you’re about to click, and it doesn’t get chopped into gibberish in an email. That’s worth something, just not ranking magic.

(Same goes for emoji, by the way. Google says it can crawl and process them in a URL path, but plenty of apps will show your cute little taco as a string of percent signs. Hard pass.)

Should I change my old URLs to make them SEO friendly?

Usually no. If a page already ranks, already gets shared and already has links pointing at it, renaming its URL is the single fastest way to make a working page disappear for a while.

Here’s the classic move. A business gets a redesign, the new site has prettier URLs, and nobody sets up redirects. Every Google result, every old Facebook post, every link from the chamber of commerce now lands on a 404. Traffic drops, the owner blames the new design, and the real culprit is a missing list of 301 redirects that would’ve taken an hour to set up. That’s a half-assed launch, and it’s way more common than it should be.

If you truly need to change a URL (the page moved, the service changed, the old slug says 2019 in it), do it once, do it on purpose, and redirect the old address to the new one permanently. Then update your own menus and links so you’re not leaning on the redirect forever. If you’re rebuilding the whole site, the redirect map is part of the job, not an afterthought. It’s one of the boring things I handle on every rebuild, which you can read about on my how I work page.

What does a good small business URL look like?

A good URL is short, lowercase, uses real words separated by hyphens, and describes the page in two to five words. That’s it.

Think yoursite.com/services/ instead of yoursite.com/index.php?page_id=47. Think /drain-cleaning/ instead of /our-wide-range-of-drain-cleaning-solutions-for-all-your-needs/. A page with its own clear topic gets its own clear address, and that’s a lot easier when each service actually has its own page instead of living as a paragraph on the homepage.

Stuff I’d avoid: dates in blog URLs (they make fresh posts look old the second the year flips), category folders three levels deep, tracking junk tacked onto links you share, and anything with uppercase letters. Google treats URL paths as case sensitive, so /About/ and /about/ can look like two different pages. That’s a pain in the ass you don’t need.

Questions people ask

Will changing underscores to hyphens boost my rankings?

Probably not enough to notice, and it can hurt short term if you skip redirects. Use hyphens on new pages and leave old ranking pages alone unless there’s a real reason to move them.

Does the domain name itself need my keyword?

No. A memorable brand name you own beats a clunky keyword domain. If you’re not sure you even control your domain, start there.

How do I know if my redesign broke old URLs?

Check Google Search Console for a jump in 404 errors after launch, and click a few of your old links from Google results and social posts. If they land on an error page, you need redirects, today.

The boring stuff is the stuff that works

I love that Google basically told everyone to relax about URLs. Use hyphens, keep it readable, and put your energy into the page itself. The only URL move that can really bite you is the one where somebody “cleans things up” and forgets the redirects. If you’ve got a redesign coming and want it done without the traffic cliff, tell me what you’re working with and I’ll make sure your old links still land somewhere good.