URL Slug Generator

This one has a definitive answer rather than a stylistic one. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner.

/my_blog_post   ->  read as "myblogpost"
/my-blog-post   ->  read as "my blog post"

Matt Cutts confirmed this years ago and it has not changed. Underscores in URLs mean the individual words are not recognised as separate terms.

Other rules worth following:

• Lowercase always. URLs are case-sensitive on most servers, so /About and /about are two pages — duplicate content, split signals.
• No spaces. They become %20, which is ugly and breaks when copied into plain text.
• ASCII only. Accented characters percent-encode into unreadable noise, which is why this tool transliterates café to cafe rather than encoding it.
• Short. Three to five meaningful words. Long slugs get truncated in search results and are miserable to share.

Removing stop words — the, a, of, and — usually makes a slug tighter without losing meaning: /the-best-guide-to-running becomes /best-guide-running.

But not always. Dropping them can produce nonsense or change the meaning entirely: /the-who becomes /who, /how-to-be-happy becomes /happy. The option is off by default here for that reason — check the output rather than applying it blindly.

Changing an existing slug is expensive. A URL that has been live accumulates links, bookmarks, shares and accrued ranking signals. Changing it throws that away unless you handle it properly:

1. Set up a 301 redirect from old to new — permanent, so signals transfer
2. Update internal links to point at the new URL directly, rather than relying on the redirect
3. Keep the redirect indefinitely; external links will keep arriving for years
4. Resubmit the sitemap

A 302 is a temporary redirect and does not pass the same signals — using one by mistake is a common and costly error.

Given all that, get the slug right at publication and then leave it alone. Fixing a typo in a slug is rarely worth the churn.