The keyword-stuffed URL slug

The keyword-stuffed URL slug

"Put all your keywords in the URL for relevance."

/best-cheap-affordable-running-shoes-men-2026/

That's not relevance, that's a confession.

Keywords in URLs are a famously weak signal — Mueller has called them 'a very small ranking factor.' Meanwhile the over-stuffed slug creates real problems: it gets truncated in the SERP, it's ugly to share, and the moment you change the year or a modifier you're staring down a redirect you'll forget to set.

Here's the failure mode: people treat the URL as a ranking lever, build it from a keyword list, then can't change anything without breaking links. You've welded transient terms ('2026', 'cheap') into a permanent address.

Fix: short, stable, human-readable. /running-shoes/men/. Put the nuance in the title and copy, where it costs nothing to update. URLs should be addresses, not ad copy.