-
How important is it to keep the slug of blog posts tight (just keyword) vs. full name of the post? Cleaning up 650 posts.
Posted by on May 9, 2026 at 9:09 pmJust joined a company and they have 650 blog posts. Many were written for SEO but unfortunately not optimized properly. They were going after a specific keyword but the slug for all posts is essentially the full name of the post.
Example:
Keyword: dropshipping business
URL Slug: how-to-start-a-dropshipping-business-in-2026
I have a lot of work to do and weighing if I should slowly update all slugs to be the keywords and do redirects on the old URL.
-
1 Reply
-
Minimal real impact, but in theory your URL exact matching your primary keyword is optimal.
Here though, it looks like your primary keyword should be “( how to )start a dropshipping business” more narrowly —
Anyway, I’d orient toward what the blog is actually about in this case.
-
Don’t touch the slugs, rarely a good idea and the impact of having the exact keyword as slug is slim to none.
-
I wouldn’t touch the slugs. That’s going to create a ton of redirects. Not much impact (long or short) IMO
-
Don’t do it.
-
Cool URLs don’t change.
Leave them, other things more important.
-
I changed my slugs because they were kinda ugly due to accents (é, ã, etc). (auto generated by wix).
But I also migrated from wix to self hosting a react website.
I did correct redirects rules in the migration, and most pages transferred authority easily, but some didnt…
Some blog pages tanked quite a bit. But the site is much faster, am ranking for new key words, and I estimate will take 1-2 or more months to rerank prooerly.
I knew there was a risk and It has been worth it as I am seeing that the SEO is coming back.
But in your case I wouldnt do It…
I only did it because our mobile performance went from 50-60 to 98-99 in Google PSI. So I think that will payoff eventually.
It was 78-80 mobile performance at maximum on wix with simple pages having no animations…
-
You can do that going forward but I wouldn’t put the time in to do it retroactively.
-
My recommendation moving forward is to not use dates in urls. That’s my opinion. Keep the slug date free especially if it needs to be updated every year.
Log in to reply.