Clean URL slugs, Turkish letters included.

What makes a good slug

The slug is the part of a URL that names the page, like technical-seo in /services/technical-seo/. Google asks for URLs that are logical and easy for people to understand: readable words rather than long ID numbers, words in your audience’s language (transliterated where that applies) and hyphens between words.

Google recommends hyphens over underscores because underscores are commonly used to keep concepts together, as in programming names such as format_date, while a hyphen clearly marks a word boundary. Words run together, as in greendress, are among its examples to avoid too.

Two more points from the same guidance apply. Google treats URLs as case-sensitive, so /APPLE and /apple are different addresses: use one case throughout, and lowercase is the simplest. And use as few parameters as you can. A slug should say what the page is, not carry tracking codes, session IDs or sort orders.

Turkish letters: keep or transliterate

Both work for Google. A slug can keep Turkish letters, as in /kapı-kolu/, or use their Latin equivalents, as in /kapi-kolu/. Google asks for non-ASCII characters to be percent-encoded in links, so the first is written kap%C4%B1-kolu in an href, and that is how it appears in server logs and anywhere else that shows the encoded form. ASCII slugs are easier to type, share and read in tools that don’t decode percent-encoding, which is why the Turkish URLs on this site are transliterated.

Whichever you choose, use it across the whole site. Mixing the two produces near-duplicate addresses and makes links harder to predict. And check what your CMS produces before you publish a batch of pages: once the URLs are indexed and linked, every fix needs a redirect.

Transliteration has to be done properly. General-purpose converters, including some CMS plugins, fall into a few Turkish traps:

• The dotless ı has no decomposed form in Unicode, so converters that strip accents and then drop everything else delete it.
• Lowercased without Turkish rules, the capital İ becomes an i followed by a combining dot. That is a different string from a plain i, shown as i%CC%87 once encoded, so “İstanbul” and “istanbul” can end up as two different addresses.
• An apostrophe joins a suffix to a name rather than starting a new word: “İstanbul’da” should become istanbulda, not istanbul-da.

Short, stable and specific

Keep a slug to the few words that name the topic. The folder already gives context, so the slug doesn’t need to repeat it: under /blog/, seo-tips is enough. Removing stop words such as “and”, “the”, “ve” or “ile” is a readability choice, and Google doesn’t require it. Drop them when the slug still reads naturally and the meaning stays the same.

Leave out anything that will date. A year or a month in the slug ties the address to that moment, so an updated page is left with a stale URL or needs a new one. Use a date only when the page really belongs to it, such as an event or an annual report. The same goes for prices, stock levels and campaign names.

Give every page its own slug. Two products or posts with the same name get the same slug, and some CMSs quietly add a number to the second one; choose a distinguishing word instead, such as a colour, a size or a location.

Changing a URL that already exists

A new slug is a new URL. If the old one has been indexed, linked or shared, add a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one, server-side if you can. Google’s guidance for URL changes is to keep redirects in place, generally for at least a year, update internal links so they point straight at the new URLs, list the new URLs in your sitemaps and give each one a self-referencing canonical. Avoid chains: if a page has moved before, redirect the oldest address directly to the newest.

Because every change costs a redirect, settle slugs before launch and keep them stable afterwards. Rewriting a live slug just to add a keyword is rarely worth it.