What a slug is
A slug is the last part of a page's address — its name in the URL. For an article at example.com/blog/kak-vybrat-web-studiu, the slug is kak-vybrat-web-studiu. Russian-speaking web culture even has a dedicated term for such addresses — ЧПУ, a "human-readable URL": both people and search engines can tell what the page is about before clicking.
A slug affects several things at once. Keywords in the address are a small but real relevance signal for search engines. A readable URL looks more trustworthy in search results and in messengers, so it gets clicked more often. And meaningful addresses help the team itself: the structure of the site is visible right in the link.
Why not just keep Cyrillic in the URL
Cyrillic is technically allowed in addresses, but it travels badly: copy /статья from the address bar and it becomes /%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C%D1%8F — a long, unreadable string that breaks the look of links in emails, documents and social posts. A Latin transliterated slug has none of these problems: it is shorter, independent of encodings and looks the same everywhere. That is why even sites with a fully Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking audience usually choose Latin URLs.
Rules of a good slug
- Keep it short. Three to five words are enough; stop words ("how", "and", "the", "for") can safely go.
- Keep the keywords. Leave the words people will actually search for — usually the nouns from the headline.
- Hyphens, not underscores. Google explicitly recommends separating words with hyphens:
web-studioreads as two words, whileweb_studiomay be treated as one. - Lowercase only. To a server,
/Pageand/pageare different addresses; capital letters breed duplicates. - Latin letters, digits and one separator. No spaces, quotes or punctuation.
Russian vs Ukrainian transliteration
The tool supports both schemes, and the difference matters — the rules are not the same. Russian «г» becomes g (gorod), Ukrainian «г» becomes h (hory), while Ukrainian «ґ» maps to g. Ukrainian «і», «ї», «є» give i, yi, ye; Russian «й» usually becomes y or i, «щ» becomes shch, «ы» becomes y. Run a Ukrainian headline through the Russian scheme and native speakers will read the result as a mistake — pick the scheme by the language of the source text.
Why a slug must not change after publishing
A URL is a permanent address: other sites link to it, readers bookmark it, search engines index it, newsletters carry it. Changing the slug breaks all of those connections: old links start returning 404 and the accumulated link authority evaporates. That is why a slug is chosen once — before publishing. If you do have to change it, set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one and update internal links and the sitemap — that way you keep both your visitors and most of the SEO value.
Generate a slug above, review it with your own eyes — the automation is good at cleaning characters, but only you can pick the words that matter — and paste it into your CMS.
