Addresses are permanent, so choose them once

Readable beats clever

Somebody should be able to read the address aloud and know roughly what the page is. That is the whole standard, and it serves visitors and search engines equally.

Words rather than numbers. Hyphens between words rather than underscores or nothing at all. Lower case throughout, because some servers treat capitals as different addresses entirely.

Short enough to be pasted into a message without wrapping. An address that fills three lines gets truncated, mistyped and avoided.

The standard is simple: somebody should be able to read the address aloud and know roughly what the page is. That serves visitors and search engines equally.

What to leave out

Dates. A page with a year in its address looks stale the following January, whatever the content says, and updating it means changing the address.

Internal identifiers, session numbers and database references. They mean nothing to a reader and they change when systems change.

Stop words that add nothing. The word and, the word for, the word a. Cutting them makes the address shorter without losing any meaning.

• Dates, which make a page look stale every January
• Internal identifiers and database references
• Session numbers
• Capital letters, which some servers treat as different addresses
• Underscores, where hyphens are the convention
• Stop words that add nothing
• File extensions

Depth and folders

Folders can show structure usefully, and most small sites do not need them. A flat structure where every page sits at the root is simpler and perfectly effective at this scale.

Where you do use folders, keep them shallow. Three levels is plenty, and four starts to signal that the site has more structure than content.

The rule that matters is not folder depth but click depth. A page reachable in two clicks from the homepage is treated as more important than one buried six deep, whatever the address looks like.

The rule that matters is click depth rather than folder depth. A page at the root that nothing links to is deeper, in the way that counts, than one three folders down and in the menu.

Keywords in addresses

Having the subject in the address helps slightly, mostly because it makes the link readable when somebody shares it as a bare address.

It is a small effect and it is routinely overstated. Stuffing three variations of a phrase into an address looks manipulative and reads badly.

One clear description of the page is the right amount. If the address names the page the way you would name it aloud, it is finished.

The effect is small and routinely overstated. One clear description is the right amount, and three variations of a phrase reads as manipulation.

Consistency across the site

Pick one form and hold to it. With or without a trailing slash. With or without the www prefix. Always secure. Never with a file extension.

Then redirect the alternatives, so a visitor typing any version arrives at the one you chose, once.

Inconsistency here is the largest source of accidental duplicates, and it is entirely preventable at setup.

Changing one later

It costs. You need a permanent redirect, you lose a little in the transfer, and every link anybody made points at the old version until the redirect handles it.

None of that is a reason never to change an address. It is a reason to change several at once if you are going to, and to decide carefully the first time.

If you are renaming for the sake of tidiness alone, the tidiness is rarely worth it.

It costs a redirect and a little of what the address earned, which is why it is worth deciding once — see redirects.

How ours are formed

Addresses on sites built here are flat, lower case, hyphenated and extension free, derived from what the page is about rather than from an internal identifier.

One form is served and the variants redirect permanently, so the slash and prefix questions never become duplicate pages.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, which includes confirming the address resolves exactly once.