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SEO Madmanby Adam Hafez
Free tool

URL structure analyzer

Check a URL's length, path depth, parameters and separators against Google's documented URL structure guidance and labelled heuristics.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored.

Checks marked "Heuristic" are diagnostics this tool computes on its own; Google has not published a specific number or rule for them. Checks marked "Google documented" restate guidance verified against Google's own URL structure documentation. Nothing you type is sent anywhere: parsing happens with the browser's own URL constructor.

Key takeaways

  • Google recommends hyphens instead of underscores to separate words in a URL, and this tool checks for that directly.
  • Google's URL structure documentation states no specific character limit, so this tool's length check is a general heuristic, not an official Google rule.
  • A URL segment that looks like a long opaque id or hex string is flagged as a heuristic guess, never a certainty.
  • Trimming query parameters that do not change a page's content is guidance Google actually documents, not folklore.
  • Every check runs in the browser with the native URL constructor, so nothing typed into the tool is ever sent anywhere.

What it takes

  • A full URL, including scheme, to analyze

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How to use it

  1. 1Paste a full URLInclude the scheme, such as https://. A relative path without a scheme fails to parse, and the tool shows that as an error rather than guessing.
  2. 2Read the HTTPS and length checksHTTPS is a documented Google signal. Length has no published Google limit, and is shown as a general diagnostic only.
  3. 3Check the word separatorGoogle's documentation recommends hyphens over underscores, because a hyphen is treated as a word boundary and an underscore joins words together.
  4. 4Check query parametersGoogle recommends trimming parameters that do not change the page's content, such as tracking or session parameters.
  5. 5Read the opaque id and readability checksThese two are this tool's own pattern guesses, labelled Heuristic, for whether a path segment looks like a long id string rather than a real word.

Paste a URL and this tool parses it with the browser’s own URL constructor, then runs a fixed set of checks against the result. Every check is labelled by where it comes from, so a documented Google recommendation is never shown the same way as a guess this tool makes on its own.

What Google actually documents

Google’s URL structure page recommends readable words over long id numbers, hyphens instead of underscores to separate words, and trimming query parameters that do not change a page’s content. It also covers percent encoding, URL fragments and case sensitivity. It does not state a specific character limit for a URL, and it does not give a maximum directory depth. Those two absences are worth naming directly, because both numbers get repeated as fact in general SEO advice without a source behind them.

What this tool flags as a heuristic, not a rule

Total character length, path depth, opaque id detection and path readability are all computed by this tool, not published by Google. The opaque id check looks for a path segment that is a long run of digits or hex-looking characters with no vowels or separators, which catches a database key or a session token but can also flag a real product code. Treat every heuristic result here as a diagnostic prompt to look closer, not as a pass or fail verdict.

Use this tool while drafting a URL, before it is published and linked from anywhere else, since changing a live URL’s structure later requires a redirect to avoid losing the page’s existing signals.

Sources

  1. 1.URL structure best practices - Google Search CentralPrimary
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