What is a URL slug?+
A slug is the URL-friendly version of a page title. It uses lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only. 'My Blog Post Title!' becomes 'my-blog-post-title'. Clean slugs are readable, shareable, and better for SEO than auto-generated IDs.
How are accented characters handled?+
Accented characters are transliterated to their ASCII equivalent: ü → u, ñ → n, é → e, ç → c. Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic characters are either romanised (pinyin/romaji) or removed depending on the transliteration setting.
Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?+
Use hyphens. Google treats hyphens as word separators, so 'seo-tool' is recognised as two words 'seo' and 'tool'. Underscores are not treated as word separators - 'seo_tool' is treated as one word 'seo_tool'.
Should I include stop words in slugs?+
Removing stop words (a, the, and, is, in, of) makes slugs shorter and keeps the focus on keywords. However, if removing them changes the meaning or makes the slug confusing, keep them. Clarity matters more than brevity.