"Stuff the keyword into the URL for the ranking boost."

"Stuff the keyword into the URL for the ranking boost."

Sorry, you're trading a real thing for a rumor.

The comparison: keyword-in-URL versus clean-short-URL. The keyword in the slug is a weak, weak signal — Google's own people have said it's minor and shrinking. A short, stable, readable URL, meanwhile, gets clicked more in the SERP, shared more cleanly, and never needs a redirect because you crammed five words in.

So /loans/personal beats /best-cheap-low-interest-personal-loans-online-2026. The first ages well. The second is a redirect waiting to happen the moment "2026" is wrong, and every redirect is a small tax.

When does the keyword help at all? On a brand-new domain with no authority, the tiny relevance hint isn't nothing. Past that, readability and stability win on every axis you can actually measure.

The folklore persists because exact-match-domain wins from 2011 got mentally filed under "URLs." Different mechanism. Long dead.

(Underscores vs hyphens still matters, marginally — hyphens are word separators, underscores join. That one's real and almost nobody gets it wrong anymore.)