URL structure checker
Check your page URL for length, case, special characters, non-ASCII characters, and other issues
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This check only covers URL structure. For a full picture of your page, run a page audit.
For issues across your whole site — duplicate titles, orphan pages, broken internal links — run a site audit.
Want us to fix what we found? Our team can help.
What is URL structure and why it matters
The URL is the first thing search engines and users see about a page — before the title, before the snippet. A clean, readable URL is a small signal that compounds across hundreds or thousands of pages: it's easier to share, easier to remember, less likely to break when copied into an email, and less likely to be flagged by a crawler as a parameterized duplicate. Google has said explicitly that URL structure is not a strong ranking factor on its own, but URLs that are unreadable or inconsistent can cause duplicate-content issues, split link equity across variants, and reduce click-through rate in the SERP.
What this tool checks
- Length — URL longer than 2000 characters (the practical upper limit many CDNs, proxies, and older browsers accept)
- Non-ASCII characters — Cyrillic, Chinese, emoji, accented Latin — these get percent-encoded when copied and become unreadable strings
- Uppercase letters — servers may treat
/Pageand/pageas different URLs, creating duplicate-content risk - Special characters — spaces, semicolons, commas, and other characters that should not appear in paths
- Underscores — Google treats underscores as part of a word, so
seo_auditreads asseoaudit; use hyphens instead - Double slashes —
//inside the path usually indicates a templating bug and can produce duplicate URLs - Excessive query parameters — more than 3 parameters, which often signals tracking bloat or faceted-navigation duplicates
Why URL structure matters for SEO
- Duplicate content — case differences, trailing slash variants, and parameter combinations can generate many URLs for the same page; Google has to pick one and may pick the wrong one
- Link equity split — external links pointing at different URL variants don't consolidate automatically; cleaner URLs reduce the number of variants that get shared
- Crawl budget — for large sites, tracking- and faceted-parameter URLs explode the crawlable surface and dilute the budget spent on real content
- CTR in SERPs — readable URLs are a small but measurable signal to users scanning results; Google displays the URL in every snippet
- Share-ability — URLs with non-ASCII or special characters often break when pasted into messengers, emails, or social media previews
Good vs bad examples
Good — short, lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII:
https://example.com/guides/url-structure-for-seoGood — product path reflects site hierarchy:
https://example.com/phones/iphone-15-proBad — mixed case duplicates content:
https://example.com/Guides/URL-StructureBad — underscores read as a single token to Google:
https://example.com/guides/url_structure_for_seoBad — non-ASCII path becomes unreadable when copied:
https://example.com/руководства/урл-структура
→ pasted elsewhere: https://example.com/%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B0/...Bad — parameter soup, typical of faceted navigation or tracking bloat:
https://example.com/search?q=phones&sort=price&order=asc&page=2&utm_source=newsletter&fbclid=IwAR...Common mistakes
- Underscores instead of hyphens — a convention mismatch many developers miss; Google groups underscore-separated words into a single token
- Uppercase in URL paths — usually a symptom of passing raw titles or user input into the URL; causes case-sensitive duplicates on Linux/Nginx
- Double slashes from string concatenation —
baseUrl + "/" + pathwithout trimming, typical of templating and route-generation bugs - Tracking parameters leaked into links — UTMs and click IDs that should only appear on inbound campaign URLs end up copied into site navigation
- Session IDs or timestamps in URLs — generate infinite unique URLs for the same content and destroy crawl budget
- Changing URL structure without 301s — a redesign that rewrites URLs but forgets to set up permanent redirects from the old paths loses all existing rankings and backlinks
Frequently asked questions
Google officially recommends hyphens to separate words in URLs. A hyphen is treated as a word separator, while an underscore joins words into a single token.
seo-audit is recognized as two words "seo" and "audit"; seo_audit is treated as one word "seoaudit." That affects relevance for individual keyword queries. For new URLs use hyphens. For existing URLs with underscores, rewriting is usually not worth the 301 work unless you're already doing a URL overhaul.Technically yes — modern browsers and Google handle percent-encoded URLs correctly. The practical problem is readability: when copied, non-ASCII URLs become unreadable strings like
%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B0. Such links are awkward to paste into emails, messengers, and social media, and they lose the keyword signal in the URL. For international sites that specifically want localized URLs, this trade-off can be acceptable; for most English-language sites, transliterate to ASCII.Google hasn't published a specific recommended length. The hard limit is that URLs longer than about 2000 characters start breaking older clients, CDNs, and some proxies — that's the threshold we flag. Beyond that, shorter is mildly better for share-ability and for fitting cleanly into the SERP snippet (Google truncates the displayed URL around 70-75 characters on desktop, less on mobile), but the effect on ranking is negligible. Focus on URLs being readable, not short for its own sake.
URL paths are case-sensitive per the HTTP spec (only the scheme and host are case-insensitive). On Linux-based servers — which is most of the web, including Nginx and Apache by default —
/Guide and /guide are treated as two different URLs and can each serve different content. That creates duplicate-content risk: Google may index both, split signals between them, and users end up on inconsistent pages. Standardize on lowercase everywhere and add a server rule that redirects mixed-case requests to the lowercase variant.Not inherently. Google indexes parameterized URLs without issue. The real problem is when parameters multiply the number of URLs for the same content — faceted navigation (
?color=red&size=m&sort=price), session IDs, and tracking tags can generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs. Best practices: use clean paths for indexable pages, keep parameters for actions that shouldn't be indexed (search, sort, filter), and point the canonical tag at the clean URL. Our tool flags pages with more than 3 parameters as worth reviewing, not as inherently broken.It can — temporarily, and permanently if you skip the redirects. Every old URL must 301-redirect to its new equivalent, individually. A blanket redirect from every old path to the new homepage destroys rankings and backlinks. Plan a mapping spreadsheet before the migration, verify the redirects after deploy, and expect a few weeks of SERP fluctuation while Google re-crawls and consolidates signals. Unless the existing URLs are actively causing problems (duplicate content, broken parameters, unreadable encoding), leave them alone.