Google: keywords in URLs stop mattering once a page has content
In a new Google Search Central video, Gary Illyes called keywords in URLs an incredibly small signal that becomes basically irrelevant once a page has content. Readability, hyphens and correct encoding are what count.
- Google's Gary Illyes says URL keywords only matter when a page has no content at all.
- Keyword-stuffed slugs bring no ranking benefit; readability, trust and shareability are the real reasons to pick a URL.
- Use short hyphenated slugs and follow Google's written docs on percent-encoding non-ASCII characters.
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Google says keywords in a domain name or URL path carry almost no ranking weight once a page has real content. Gary Illyes made the point in the first episode of a new Google Search Central video series, published on October 14, 2026, which also covered emoji, international characters and hyphens versus underscores in URLs.
What did Google say about keywords in URLs?
Illyes said keywords in URLs are an incredibly small signal that only matters when Google has nothing else to go on, such as a brand-new page with zero content. As reported by PPC Land, he added that once content appears, “the keywords in the domain and the URL in general become basically irrelevant.”
The episode, the premiere of The Non-Canonical Cabinet with Illyes and Cherry Prommawin, also covered:
- Emoji: not allowed in domain names under internet standards, but usable in URL paths, where they are percent encoded.
- Underscores: Google treats underscore-joined words as one long word, so it recommends hyphens.
- Encoding: PPC Land notes that Google’s written URL structure documentation, last updated December 10, 2025, goes further than the video and asks sites to percent-encode non-ASCII characters in their links themselves.
Do keywords in URLs still help SEO rankings?
For any page with content, effectively no, according to Google. That narrows the case for keyword-rich URLs to a single edge case, and it is more specific than Google’s May 2026 guidance, which PPC Land says described domain and URL keywords as having “hardly any effect” beyond breadcrumbs.
In practice, this shifts how you should think about URLs. The reasons to prefer one URL over another are now readability, user trust and how links look when shared. The hosts pointed out that emoji or non-ASCII paths can appear as gibberish in some apps, which can hurt clicks. Exact-match domain strategies and slugs packed with modifiers like “best” or “cheap” are spending effort on a signal Google says it barely uses.
Treat the video as explanation, not policy. Where it differs from the documentation, for example on who should handle encoding, the written page is what Google links as the reference. Also note this is one Google statement; practitioners have long reported anecdotes about exact-match domains, but Google’s position here is unusually direct.
How to structure URLs the way Google recommends
- Keep slugs short and descriptive. Use words that describe the page in your audience’s language, not a list of target keywords.
- Use hyphens, not underscores. Write chicken-gear, not chicken_gear.
- Percent-encode non-ASCII characters in your href attributes, as the documentation recommends, rather than relying on browsers.
- Don’t rewrite existing URLs just to strip keywords. As general practice, URL changes require redirects and carry migration risk; the gain from removing keywords is close to zero.
- Check how your URLs render when shared in messaging and social apps, especially if they contain non-Latin characters.
- Audit crawl traps such as session IDs and endless filter parameters, which the documentation flags as a crawl efficiency issue.