Websites and search
Give your growing website clear paths to every page
Google has clarified its URL guidance. Here is how a small business can keep new and older pages reachable, with useful links, pagination and a current sitemap.
A bookshop adds reading events, staff recommendations and articles to its website. The newest items look good on the home page, but a customer cannot find a reading guide published a few months ago. The page still exists. It has simply slipped out of the visible navigation. As a small website grows, keeping useful pages connected becomes part of the publishing work.
What changed this week?
Google's latest documentation update is modest, but it is a useful prompt to check how a growing website is organised. We reviewed the change on 24 October.
Google clarifies its advice on word separators
The Search Central update log dates a clarification of URL structure guidance to 23 October 2026. It says the wording was aligned with its video series. This is a documentation clarification, not an announcement of a new ranking system.
Google Search Central: documentation updates23 October 2026
Readable addresses remain the recommendation
Google recommends descriptive words and hyphens between words in URLs. Its explanation is that hyphens make word boundaries clearer, while underscores have historically been used to hold a concept together. For a new reading guide, an address such as /guides/choosing-a-book-club-book gives a person a reasonable idea of what to expect.
Our interpretation is straightforward: choose a sensible convention when publishing new pages. The clarification does not provide a reason to rename every working address or a promised improvement in traffic.
Google: URL structure best practicesReviewed 24 October 2026
What does this mean for a small business?
Consider an illustrative bookshop with a growing collection of reading guides. Each guide answers a recurring customer question, so the owner links to it in emails and recommendations. Once a guide moves off the latest-posts section, customers should still be able to reach it from the guides archive.
The same issue can affect a trade business with project examples, a studio with classes or a shop with product advice. Publishing more pages creates more material to maintain. It also creates a need to decide where each page belongs and how someone will find it later.
A useful review starts with the customer's task. Can they open the relevant page from the menu or a related page? Can they share its address with someone else? Does the destination still show the information the link describes? Those are concrete questions an owner can check without interpreting a search ranking report.
Links and pagination need to keep working as you add content
A visible link should have a real destination
Google says it generally discovers linked pages through HTML anchor elements with an href attribute containing a web address. A script that reacts to a click is not a reliable substitute. In plain terms, ask your developer to make article titles, category links and navigation genuine links that a crawler can follow.
Use labels that describe the destination. In the bookshop example, a link called 'Choosing a book club book' is more useful than an isolated 'Click here'. The same label helps a customer scanning a page decide where to go next.
Google: link best practicesExisting guidance; reviewed 24 October
Older pages need a route through the archive
Google's pagination guidance says crawlers generally do not click buttons to reveal more content. It recommends links between pages in a sequence, a distinct URL for each page and a canonical URL pointing to that page itself. A canonical is the page's declaration of its preferred address.
For our illustrative bookshop, the archive could show a small set of guides followed by ordinary links to page two and page three. Each guide would keep its own address even as its position in the archive changes. A 'Load more' interface can still be used, but the developer needs to provide a crawlable route to the underlying pages.
Google: pagination and incremental page loadingExisting guidance; reviewed 24 October
A sitemap supports discovery
A sitemap lists important URLs and can include information about their images and modification dates. Google describes it as a way to help discover content, while explicitly saying it does not guarantee crawling or indexing.
Treat it as part of publishing: the new page should appear, its address should match the public page, and removed or redirected addresses should be reviewed. Also check the links a customer actually uses. Having a URL in a sitemap does not make an otherwise hidden page easy for a person to find.
Google: what a sitemap doesExisting guidance; reviewed 24 October
Keep established addresses stable where you can
Our advice is to separate problems that prevent access from cosmetic preferences. A broken archive link deserves attention. An established address containing an underscore may not justify a migration on its own.
Before changing a page's address, consider where it is already used: customer emails, QR codes, social posts and links from other websites. Updating the headline or improving the page does not necessarily require changing that address.
Plan necessary URL changes as a small migration
Google's migration guidance recommends mapping old URLs to their new destinations, using permanent server redirects where possible, and updating internal links, canonicals and sitemaps. It also warns that search visibility can fluctuate during a move.
If the bookshop reorganises its guides, the old link to a specific guide should take readers directly to that guide's new address. Sending every old link to the home page would leave customers to find the material again. Test a few real links from older emails before considering the change finished.
Google: managing URL changesExisting guidance; reviewed 24 October
What can you do this week?
Choose one section that has grown recently, such as articles, services or events. A short review of that section is a manageable start.
- Pick one recent page and two older useful pages. Start at the home page and follow visible links to each, checking the experience on a phone.
- Check that each page has an address you can copy, share and open directly. Use a consistent, readable naming convention for new pages.
- Follow the archive to its last page. Ask your developer to confirm that pagination and article links are ordinary crawlable links.
- Compare those pages with the sitemap and check their preferred addresses. Ask your developer to investigate mismatches or indexing blocks on pages intended to be public.
- Keep a short list of broken routes and unclear labels. Fix those first, and plan redirects before changing any established page address.
How Context Aware can help
We can review the routes through your website, check article and archive links, and confirm that metadata and sitemap entries use consistent addresses. If you are moving from a small brochure site to regular publishing, we can help set up an archive that stays usable as the collection grows.
If a restructure is needed, we can map existing addresses to their replacements and test the customer journeys after deployment. Bring us one section customers struggle to find, and we can start there.
Research note: we reviewed Hacker News and the Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Search Central updates during topic selection. This article uses Google's primary documentation for its search guidance. X profile access returned an error and targeted discovery did not provide a relevant accessible current discussion, so we have not drawn conclusions from X.
Prepared by Context Aware with AI assistance and linked primary sources. Examples are illustrative. How we write our insights.