Google has used the first episode of a new comedy-style video series to restate how little keywords in URLs matter for ranking. “The Non-Canonical Cabinet” is a Search Central YouTube series hosted by Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin, and its debut episode went live on Oct. 14. Search Engine Journal covered the release, and Search Engine Roundtable reported on the same video.
The series was teased on Oct. 6. Google describes it as a sitcom-style show built around questions from site owners and the SEO community, and it invites viewers to leave their own odd cases in the comments. The episode description says these questions would not fit a standard FAQ page, yet they remain useful to Search and to generative AI features. Illyes also fronted “How Search Works,” a five-part Search Central series from 2024. That one began with fundamentals. This one begins with audience questions.
On ranking, Illyes described URL keywords as “an incredibly small signal.” He said they count mainly when Google has nothing else to evaluate, for example a site that is only seconds old and has no content. Once Google has seen the pages, he said, the keywords in the domain and path “become basically irrelevant.” Search Engine Roundtable adds that Illyes also made a point of saying Google can detect spam in URLs.
None of this is a reversal. John Mueller described URL keywords as a “very small ranking factor” in 2016 and a “very very lightweight factor” in 2021, according to Search Engine Journal. The episode’s closing recap, per the same outlet, tells viewers to stop packing keywords into URLs to game results.
On word separators, Illyes said that when underscores connect terms in a path, Google reads the result as a single long word. He allowed that this can be acceptable, since Google may still manage to use the individual words, but he repeated that hyphens are the recommended divider on the web at large. Google’s written guidance matches and cites “historical reasons”: underscores conventionally tie terms together in code, such as in function names.
Domains and paths follow different rules. Domain names are governed by IETF standards (RFC 1035 and RFC 1123), which allow letters, numbers, and hyphens, and Prommawin said Google follows them. Internationalized domain names are converted to Punycode, which starts with “xn—”. Illyes warned that lookalike characters across scripts, such as a Cyrillic letter that resembles an English “p”, can confuse both people and browsers.
Emoji cannot appear in a domain name under current standards. A 2017 ICANN Board Resolution calls them “disallowed” for internationalized domain names, though some country-specific top-level domains can still register them at the second level. Paths are looser. According to Illyes, a path containing an emoji is something Googlebot can fetch and handle. Browsers percent-encode the character, so the chicken emoji used in the episode turns into %F0%9F%90%94. Some browsers and social apps show “a string of gibberish” instead of the emoji. Google’s own URL guidance already advises percent-encoding any non-ASCII character in a path.
Google has not published any measurement behind the “incredibly small” description, so the claim rests on Illyes’s word. It is, however, consistent with a decade of similar statements, and our June report on Mueller saying hyphenated domains carry no SEO penalty points the same direction.
For site teams, the practical reading is restraint. Do not rewrite or migrate working URLs to add keywords, because the redirect work and risk buy almost nothing by Google’s own account. Use hyphens for new paths, keep emoji out of anything people must type, copy, or share, and treat any request for keyword-heavy slugs as a branding or usability choice rather than a ranking tactic.
Search Engine Journal reports that the next episode covers robots.txt. No release date is listed in either video description, and the trailer preceded the debut by eight days. Teams with robots.txt edge cases can leave them in the comments now.
Search Engine Journal, “Google Launches A Video Series For Odd Technical SEO Questions,” by Matt G. Southern, October 14, 2026.
