Google says URL keywords become irrelevant once a page has content

Google Search Central on October 14, 2026 published the first episode of The Non-Canonical Cabinet, a 12-minute 56-second YouTube video in which Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin answered questions about what characters can appear in domain names and URL paths, and in which the speaker answering the ranking question said keywords in a domain or URL become “basically irrelevant” the moment a page has content.

In Short

Two Google employees made a video explaining which letters, symbols and emoji are allowed in a web address, and whether stuffing keywords into one helps a site rank. Their answer is that emoji are not allowed in the main domain name but can go in the part after it, and that keywords in an address do almost nothing once there is real content on the page. For anyone naming pages, the message from Google is that short, readable addresses with words separated by hyphens are what it prefers, though its own written documentation goes further on encoding than the video…