How to Fix URL Structure Issues

What the URL structure check tests

SiteCurl extracts all internal links from each page and checks four things: uppercase characters in the path, underscores instead of hyphens, paths longer than 100 characters, and paths deeper than 4 directory levels.

Why it matters

URLs are one of the first things search engines analyze. Clean, readable URLs signal an organized site. Messy URLs with uppercase characters, underscores, or excessive depth signal poor structure.

Visitors also evaluate URLs before clicking. In search results, a clean URL like /pricing is more clickable than /index.php?page_id=142&category=3.

How to fix it

Use lowercase paths

URLs are case-sensitive on most servers. /About-Us and /about-us can be different pages, causing duplicate content. Always use lowercase:

Bad: /About-Us, /Services/Web-Design

Good: /about-us, /services/web-design

Set up server-side redirects from uppercase variants to the lowercase version.

Use hyphens, not underscores

Google treats hyphens as word separators but treats underscores as joiners. Replace underscores with hyphens:

Bad: /my_great_page

Good: /my-great-page

Shorten long URLs

Remove extra words and path segments:

Bad: /blog/articles/2024/01/15/the-complete-guide-to-understanding-seo-optimization-for-beginners

Good: /blog/seo-optimization-guide

Reduce directory depth

Flatten deep paths by removing extra intermediate directories:

Bad: /shop/category/subcategory/brand/product-name

Good: /shop/product-name

How to verify the fix

Run a SiteCurl scan and check the SEO section for the URL structure finding. All internal URLs should be lowercase, use hyphens, stay under 100 characters, and have 4 or fewer path segments.

Related checks

URL structure relates to crawl depth (deep URLs often correlate with deep crawl depth) and canonical URLs (use canonicals to handle case variations).

Start a free trial to audit your URL structure.