On October 14, Google's Gary Illyes called keywords in a URL or a domain name an “incredibly small signal”: it only matters when Google has nothing else to go on, and becomes basically irrelevant once Google sees content. To separate words, Google recommends hyphens: words joined by underscores are read as one long word. Emoji work in a URL path, not in a domain name. For a small business whose pages are already live, renaming addresses to add keywords means running a site move: permanent redirects, internal links to fix, and rankings that can fluctuate for a few weeks.
Contents
On October 14, 2026, Google published the first episode of The Non-Canonical Cabinet, a Search Central video series hosted by Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin about questions too specific for a FAQ page but still useful for Search and generative AI features.1 A trailer had announced it on October 6.2 The episode covers what can go in a domain name and in a URL path, the weight of keywords in URLs, and the choice between hyphens and underscores.1 This article covers its answers, Google's documentation on URL structure, and what changing live URLs involves.
01Keywords in URLs, an “incredibly small signal”
The episode asks the question with a keyword-stuffed address along the lines of “best grilled chicken in London, cheap, delicious”: does a URL like that put a page at the top of the results? Gary Illyes answers no, not even a little.1
What Gary Illyes said
For Gary Illyes, keywords in a URL are an incredibly small signal that really only matters when Google has absolutely nothing else to go on. His example is a site that is two seconds old with zero content.1
The moment Google sees content on the page, keywords in the domain and the URL become basically irrelevant.1 The recap at the end of the episode asks people to stop trying to game search results with long, keyword-stuffed URLs.1
A long-standing position at Google
Search Engine Journal recalls that John Mueller already called URL keywords a “very small ranking factor” in 2016 and a “very very lightweight factor” in 2021.2 Search Engine Roundtable notes that Google had covered these topics before and sums up the episode this way: keywords in a URL or domain won't do much for rankings.3
What Google recommends instead
Google's documentation asks for descriptive URLs: replace long ID numbers with readable words where possible, and use your audience's language.4 In the episode, the reason given is about people: some rely on the address bar to understand where they are on a site, and a clean URL generally builds trust.1
| Approach recommended by Google | Approach to avoid |
|---|---|
Simple, descriptive words: https://example.com/wiki/Aviation | Long, unreadable IDs: https://example.com/index.php?topic=42&area=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1 |
Words in the audience's language: https://example.com/lebensmittel/pfefferminz for a German-speaking audience | Unnecessary parameters that don't change the page content |
A descriptive URL is mainly there to be read: the keyword it contains weighs very little next to the content of the page.14
02Hyphens, underscores, accents and emoji
The episode separates two areas: the domain name, governed by ICANN and IETF rules, and the path after the extension, after the .com or .org, which is much freer.1 The same characters are not handled the same way in each.1
Hyphens rather than underscores
In a URL path, Google treats words linked together with underscores as one long word. Gary Illyes adds that this is sometimes fine, because Google may be able to use those words without separating them, but Google recommends hyphens, the universal word separator across the web, which is easier to read for its systems and for people.1
The documentation says the same and gives the historical reason: underscores are already commonly used to join concepts that belong together, for example in function names in many programming languages, such as format_date.4 It also advises against running words together with no separator at all.4
| Style | Example from the documentation | Google's position |
|---|---|---|
| Hyphens | /summer-clothing/filter?color-profile=dark-grey | recommended |
| Underscores | /summer_clothing/filter?color_profile=dark_grey | not recommended |
| Words run together | /greendress | not recommended |
Accents, capital letters and non-Latin characters
The documentation accepts words in the audience's language, including outside the Latin alphabet, as long as non-ASCII characters are percent-encoded in links: gemüse becomes gem%C3%BCse in the href attribute.4 Accented letters, such as the French é, are among these non-ASCII characters.
Google also points out that URLs are case-sensitive: /APPLE and /apple are two distinct addresses. If the server treats both the same way, the documentation advises converting all text to the same case.4
Emoji: possible in the path, not allowed in the domain
The standards that govern domain names don't allow emoji, so a domain made of emoji is not possible. Internationalized domain names, in Chinese or Arabic characters for example, are converted to Punycode, a string that starts with “xn--”.1
In the path, on the other hand, Googlebot crawls an address that contains an emoji and Google's systems process it.1 Browsers percent-encode it, but not every browser or app displays it: some show a string of gibberish instead, which can put people off clicking the link.1
| Element | Domain name | URL path |
|---|---|---|
| Letters, numbers, hyphens | allowed | allowed |
| Underscore | not allowed | allowed, words read as one |
| Non-Latin characters | allowed, converted to Punycode (xn--) | allowed, percent-encoded |
| Emoji | not allowed by the standards | crawled and processed by Google, display not guaranteed |
03Changing live URLs: what it involves
On an existing site, the question becomes whether to change: renaming indexed addresses to slip keywords in. Google treats any change to the URLs of existing pages as a site move, with a procedure and timelines.5
What changing an address involves
Google's page on site moves lists the steps: map each old URL to its new one, set up permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308), point rel="canonical" tags and the sitemap to the new addresses, then update internal links.5 This is the work described in the redirect plan for a website redesign, where each old page goes to its equivalent.
Google asks you to keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, so that signals can transfer to the new URLs.5 Because redirects are slow for users, the page also advises updating your own links.5 An internal link that points to an old, redirected address is in fact one of the mistakes that break internal linking.
The delay and the fluctuation
According to Google, with any significant change to a site, rankings may fluctuate while Google recrawls and reindexes it. For a medium-sized site, it can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs gradually replace the old ones in results, and longer for a large site.5
The documentation states that this temporary fluctuation in visibility is normal and that rankings settle over time.5 A small business that renames its addresses to add keywords therefore accepts this period for a signal that Gary Illyes describes as basically irrelevant once the page has content.1
What a small business does, address by address
Search Engine Journal notes that the episode's advice on URL paths repeats Google's documentation: a site that already follows it has nothing to change.2 The table matches common cases with Google's position.
| Situation | Google's position |
|---|---|
| New page to create | descriptive URL in the audience's language, words separated by hyphens, written in a single case4 |
| Readable URL already live, without the target keyword | a keyword in the URL is a very small signal once content is seen; changing the address follows the site move procedure15 |
| URL with underscores | hyphens are recommended, Google may sometimes use the joined words1 |
# fragment used to change content, session IDs, unnecessary parameters | crawling problems described in the documentation4 |
On WordPress, the shape of future addresses is set in the permalinks, which the SEO audit checklist lists among the settings to check on this CMS.