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Crawling and indexing

URL structure best practices for Google Search

To make sure Google Search can crawl your site effectively, use a crawlable URL structure that
meets the following requirements. If your URLs don’t meet the following criteria, Google Search
will likely crawl your site inefficiently — including but not limited to extremely high
crawl rates, or not at all.

Requirements for a crawlable URL structure

Follow IETF STD 66

Google Search supports URLs as defined by
IETF STD 66. Characters defined by
the standard as reserved
must be percent encoded.

Don’t use URL fragments to change content

Don’t use fragments to change the
content of a page, as Google Search generally doesn’t support URL fragments. Here’s an
example of a URL fragment:

If you’re using JavaScript to change content, use the History API
instead.

Use a common encoding for URL parameters

When specifying URL parameters, use the following common encoding: an equal sign
(=) to separate key-value pairs and add additional parameters with an
ampersand (&). To list multiple values for the same key within a key-value
pair, you can use any character that doesn’t conflict with
IETF STD 66, such as a comma
(,).

RecommendedNot recommended
Using an equal sign (=) to separate key-value pairs and an ampersand
(&) to add additional parameters:
Using a colon (:) to separate key-value pairs and brackets ([ ])
to add additional parameters:
Using a comma (,) to list multiple values for the same key, an equal sign
(=) to separate key-value pairs, and an ampersand (&) to add
additional parameters:
Using a single comma (,) to separate key-value pairs and double
commas (,,) to add additional parameters:

Make it easy to understand your URL structure

To help Google Search (and your users) better understand your site, we recommend creating a simple
URL structure, applying the following best practices when possible.

Best practices

Use descriptive URLs

When possible, use readable words rather than long ID numbers in your URLs.

Recommended (simple, descriptive words)Not recommended (unreadable, long ID numbers)

Use your audience’s language

Use words in your audience’s language in the URL (and, if applicable, transliterated words).
For example, if your audience is searching in German, use German words in the URL:

Or if your audience is searching in Japanese, use Japanese words in the URL:

Use percent encoding as necessary

When linking to pages on your site,
use percent encoding in your links’s href attributes as necessary. Unreserved
ASCII characters may be left in the non-encoded form. Additionally, characters in the
non-ASCII range should be percent encoded. For example:

Recommended (percent encoding)Not recommended (non-ASCII characters)

Use hyphens to separate words

We recommend separating words in your URLs, when possible. Specifically, we recommend using
hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) to
separate words in your URLs, as it helps users and search engines better identify
concepts in the URL. For historical reasons, we don’t recommend using underscores, as
this style is already commonly used for denoting concepts that should be kept together,
for example, by various programming languages to name functions (such as format_date).

RecommendedNot recommended

Using hyphens (-) to separate words:

Using underscores (_) to separate words:

Joining words together in the URL:

Use as few parameters as you can

Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters (meaning, parameters
that don’t change the content).

Be aware that URLs are case sensitive

Like any other HTTP client following IETF STD 66, Google Search’s URL handling is case
sensitive (for example, Google treats both /APPLE and /apple as
distinct URLs with their own content). If upper and lower case text in a URL is treated
the same by your web server, convert all text to the same case so it’s easier for Google
to determine that URLs reference the same page.

For multi-regional sites

If your site is multi-regional, consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to
geotarget your site. For more examples of how you can structure your URLs, refer to
using locale-specific URLs.

Recommended (using a country-specific domain):

Recommended (using a country-specific subdirectory with gTLD):

Avoid common issues related to URLs

Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause problems for
crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar
content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or
Google Search may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Unnecessarily high numbers of URLs can be caused by a number of issues. These include:

Common issues

Additive filtering of a set of items

Many sites provide different views of the same set of items or search results, often
allowing the user to filter this set using defined criteria (for example: show me hotels on
the beach). When filters can be combined in an additive manner (for example: hotels on the
beach and with a fitness center), the number of URLs (views of data) in the sites explodes.
Creating a large number of slightly different lists of hotels is redundant, as Googlebot
only needs to see a small number of lists from which it can reach the page for each hotel.
For example:

  • Hotel properties at “value rates”:
  • Hotel properties at “value rates” on the beach:
  • Hotel properties at “value rates” on the beach and with a fitness center:

Irrelevant parameters

Irrelevant parameters in the URL can cause a large number of URLs, such as:

  • Referral parameters:
  • Shopping sorting parameters:
  • Session IDs:

Consider using a robots.txt file
to block Googlebot’s access to these problematic URLs.

Calendar issues

A dynamically generated calendar might generate links to future and previous dates with
no restrictions on start or end dates. For example:

If your site has an infinite calendar, add a nofollow
attribute to links to dynamically created future calendar pages.

Placing a parent-relative link
on the wrong page may create infinite spaces if your server doesn’t respond with the right
HTTP status code for nonexistent pages. For example, a parent-relative link such as
<a href="../../category/stuff">...</a> on https://example.com/category/community/070413/html/FAQ.htm
may lead to bogus URLs such as https://example.com/category/community/category/stuff.
To fix, use root-relative URLs in your links (instead of parent-relative).

Fixing crawling-related URL structure problems

If you notice that Google Search is crawling these problematic URLs, we recommend the following:

Alien Road

How we apply this

Readable URLs are a small ranking factor and a large operational one. We standardise them early because every later decision, redirects, analytics, canonical tags, inherits whatever pattern the site started with.

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