URL structure and SEO friendlinessWhat it checks and how to fix it

What it checks

Inspects the page's URL for SEO-unfriendly patterns: a path over 75 characters, uppercase letters, underscores, double slashes, more than 4 directory levels, legacy extensions (.php, .asp, .aspx, .jsp, .cgi, .cfm), more than 3 query parameters, or encoded spaces. One issue is a warning, two or more fail the check, and none passes.

Why it matters

Short, readable, lowercase URLs are easier to share, more likely to be clicked in search results, and less prone to duplicate-content problems (on most servers /About and /about are two different pages). Deep paths and long query strings also make crawling less efficient and hint that a page is buried.

How to fix it

Use short, lowercase, hyphen-separated paths that describe the content, and keep parameters for filtering, not for identifying pages:

Bad:  https://example.com/Products/Category_Shoes/item.php?id=42&ref=nav&sort=asc&view=grid
Good: https://example.com/shoes/trail-runner-2

When you change URLs, permanently redirect the old ones so you keep their links and rankings:

location = /About-Us { return 301 /about-us; }

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^About-Us$ /about-us [R=301,L]

# Rails config/routes.rb
get "/About-Us", to: redirect("/about-us", status: 301)

On Cloudflare, use a Single Redirect rule (Rules > Redirect Rules) with a 301 status. Update internal links and the sitemap to the new URLs so crawlers do not keep hitting the redirects.