URL Slug
The part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually the last segment after the domain — typically a lowercase, hyphen-separated version of the page title.
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page, usually the last segment after the domain. For example, in https://serpview.com/blog/url-slug-generator, the slug is url-slug-generator. Slugs typically derive from the page's title, lowercased, with spaces replaced by hyphens.
Good slugs are short (50-60 characters max), descriptive (the reader can predict the page content from the URL), keyword-rich (include the primary keyword without stuffing), lowercase (avoids case-sensitivity issues on some servers), and use hyphens as separators (Google officially recommends hyphens over underscores).
Google's John Mueller has repeatedly said URLs are a "very small" ranking factor, but slugs affect click-through rate directly. A 90-character slug like /blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-keyword-research-for-beginners-2026-edition looks spammy in SERPs and gets truncated. The 2021 Backlinko study of 11.8M Google results found that shorter URLs (under 60 chars) had a slight ranking correlation — but the bigger effect is psychological: clean slugs are more clickable.
Common pitfalls: using post IDs in slugs (/blog/12345), changing a slug after publishing without setting up a 301 redirect (loses all link equity), using underscores instead of hyphens, including dates when the content is evergreen, and stuffing keywords (the-seo-seo-guide-seo-2026). Best practice: use the page's title minus stop words (a, the, and, of), lowercase, hyphen-separated, no date. SERPView's URL Slug Generator does this in one click.