SEO-friendly URL checker

Check any page address for the three URL problems an Evisio SEO audit report flags: underscores, length and too many query parameters. It’s free, instant and runs in your browser.

Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to Evisio until you ask for the full report.

What makes a URL SEO-friendly?

A URL is often the first thing people and search engines read about a page, before its title. An SEO-friendly URL is short, readable and says what the page is about. www.example.com/blog/seo-audit-checklist tells everyone what to expect; www.example.com/index.php?id=4821&cat=7&ref=nav&utm_source=mail tells them nothing.

What this checker looks for

The same three checks Evisio runs on every page of your site, with the same limits.

Underscores in the path

Google recommends hyphens between words in URLs, not underscores. A search engine reads seo-audit as two words and seo_audit as one, so the underscore version can miss searches for either word. Evisio flags any underscore in the path, the part after the domain.

URL length

Evisio flags URLs longer than 200 characters. There is no hard limit in search engines, but long URLs get cut off in search results, are hard to share, and usually carry folders or tracking codes the page doesn’t need.

Query parameters

Parameters are the ?name=value pairs at the end of a URL. Evisio flags more than three. Every combination of parameters can be another address for the same page, which splits ranking signals between copies and spends search engines’ crawl time on duplicates.

How to fix a URL that fails

  1. Choose the new address: lowercase words separated by hyphens, only as long as it needs to be.
  2. Add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, so existing links and rankings carry over.
  3. Update your internal links and your XML sitemap to point at the new URL directly.
  4. For parameters, keep only the ones that change what the page shows, point the page’s canonical tag at the clean URL, and leave tracking codes out of internal links.

Step-by-step guides: how to fix underscores in URLs, the best maximum URL length and how to fix too many URL parameters.

Check every URL on your site

This checker tests one address at a time. An Evisio SEO audit report checks every page it crawls against these three rules and more than 80 others, then gives you a website health score and a task list with the fix for each issue. Start a free SEO audit report.

Questions

Are underscores bad for SEO?

They won’t stop a page from ranking, but hyphens make each word count. Use hyphens for every new URL. For an existing page that already ranks well, change the URL only with a 301 redirect in place.

How long should a URL be?

As short as it can be while still describing the page. Most good URLs are a few words long; anything over 200 characters fails Evisio’s check.

Do URL parameters hurt SEO?

Not on their own. Filters and sorting often need them. The problem is many parameters creating many addresses for one page. Keep them few, and give each page a canonical tag pointing at its main URL.

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