Question 1

Hyphens or underscores?

Accepted Answer

Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so about_us can be read as one token. Underscores are here because some systems require them, not because they are a good default.

Question 2

Should I drop stop words?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes. 'best-crm-small-teams' reads fine; 'what-not-to-do' becomes 'not-do', which no longer says what the page is. The option is off by default because a shorter slug is not automatically a better one, and a slug that no longer parses as English is worse than three extra characters.

Question 3

Why did my apostrophe not become a hyphen?

Accepted Answer

Because men-s-shorts is not a word. Apostrophes are removed rather than replaced — including the curly ones you get from pasting out of a word processor, which is where most of these come from.

Question 4

What happens to accents and non-Latin characters?

Accepted Answer

Accented Latin letters are folded to their base form, so 'café' becomes 'cafe' rather than losing the letter. Characters with no Latin equivalent are dropped, so a headline in a non-Latin script will come back empty — for those, write the slug by hand or transliterate first.

Question 5

Should I put the year in the slug?

Accepted Answer

Only if you are willing to leave it there. A URL is a promise; changing it later costs you a redirect and every link that was not updated. Put the year in the title, where you can change it next January.

Question 6

How long is too long?

Accepted Answer

Three to five words carries almost every page. Long slugs get truncated in results and in shared links, and the words past the fifth are rarely doing work.

Clean slugs, a list at a time

Example output for the three placeholders

Pick a convention once

Questions

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