For this edition of Ask Yoast, we received a question that belongs in the SEO basics category: what’s a slug? The answer is simple because it’s the piece of the URL that distinguishes a post. In this Ask Yoast, Joost explains what a slug is and what its SEO benefits are.
This Ask Yoast is all about the following question:
“What’s a slug? What’s the difference with a URL? And what is the SEO benefit of a slug?
Check out the video or read the answer below!
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What’s a slug?
Can’t watch the video? Read the transcript here:
“Slug” is actually a word that comes from the WordPress community. A “slug” is the piece of the URL that distinguishes that post. So if you have yoast.com/wordpress-seo, the URL for our WordPress SEO article, then WordPress SEO is the bit that identifies that page as being our WordPress SEO article. It’s what our system uses to recognize that it has to serve you that specific page. It’s the defining part of the URL.
The SEO benefit of a slug is that you can change the words in there and make sure that it has the words that you really want to rank for, because it’s one of the indicators to Google of what a page is about. It’s also one of the things that people see in the search results. So, if you see in the search results ten different URLs underneath each other, about a certain topic, like WordPress SEO, and you see our yoast.com/wordpress-seo, that’s very on point and people might click on that a lot easier than if it’s yoast.com/?P=613458, which is the old default of WordPress.
So that’s what a “slug” is and why it has SEO benefit.
Good luck!”
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