Agent Wranglers

SEO-5Recommended

Keep addresses short and readable

Keep addresses lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive and shallow. Leave out file endings and session parameters, and treat addresses as permanent.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Choose one style with lowercase, hyphens, and either no trailing slash or always one. Enforce it with redirects. Name pages for what they are, and keep dates and IDs out of lasting URLs. Never route pages with a # fragment, because search engines ignore everything after #. Apply the style to new addresses. Rename an existing address only together with a 301 in the redirect map.

Examples

Plain text example

Good: https://example.com/services/website-review
Bad:  https://example.com/Services/Website_Review.html?sessionid=8f3a
Bad:  https://example.com/2026/03/02/page?id=1234
Bad:  https://example.com/#/services/website-review

How to check

A crawl matches every URL against ^https://example\.com(/[a-z0-9]+(-[a-z0-9]+)*)*$, adapted to your chosen slash style. No URL fails.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/seo/site-structure/url-structure">Agent Wranglers SEO playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.