URL: /rules/url/slug-convention

---
title: "URL Convention Consistency"
description: "Finds URLs that break the site's own URL conventions"
---

Finds URLs that break the site's own URL conventions

| | |
|---|---|
| **Rule ID** | `url/slug-convention` |
| **Category** | [URL Structure](/rules/url) |
| **Scope** | Site-wide |
| **Severity** | warning |
| **Weight** | 3/10 |

## How it works

Every other URL rule judges one URL against a fixed idea of a good URL. None of them
can see that a site is internally inconsistent, which is what actually produces
duplicate-content and canonical bugs: `/My_Page`, `/my-page` and `/my-page/` are
three different URLs to a crawler even when they serve the same thing.

So the mixing is the finding here, never an individual URL. The rule computes your
site's own dominant convention in each of five dimensions and reports only the
minority form standing against it:

| Dimension | Scope | Compares |
|---|---|---|
| Slug word separator | site-wide | kebab-case vs snake_case vs camelCase |
| URL letter case | site-wide | all-lowercase paths vs paths carrying uppercase |
| Trailing slash | site-wide | present vs absent, on extensionless paths |
| Date in slug | per page type | dated vs undated posts of the same type |
| Path depth | per page type | path-segment count within one page type |

A site that is uniformly snake_case, or uniformly slash-terminated, is clean here:
there is no minority to report. The rule only ever describes the deviants against
the dominant form.

It stays quiet unless it has grounds to speak:

- Fewer than 10 crawled pages: no site norm exists, so the rule is skipped.
- Fewer than 10 pages voting in a site-wide dimension (or 8 pages of one page type
  for the per-type dimensions): the dimension is dropped, not guessed at.
- No form reaching 70% of a dimension: the site mixes deliberately there, so
  nothing in it is a deviant.

## Precedence over the per-page URL rules

The per-page rules own their pages, and this rule defers to them so one root cause
is never reported twice:

- [URL Lowercase](/rules/url/lowercase) already warns on every path containing an
  uppercase letter, so those pages are dropped from the letter-case dimension.
- [URL Hyphens](/rules/url/hyphens) already warns on every path containing an
  underscore, so those pages are dropped from the separator dimension.
- [Trailing Slash](/rules/url/trailing-slash) only raises on paths with a file
  extension, so this rule judges the trailing-slash dimension over extensionless
  paths only.

A dimension whose deviants are entirely deferred is still named in the finding, so
nothing is silently dropped.

## Solution

Your site uses more than one URL convention: some paths follow one form and a
minority follow another. Pick the dominant form already used by most of your site,
migrate the minority onto it, and 301-redirect the old paths so links and rankings
follow. If a section deliberately differs (a dated archive, a deeper product tree),
that is fine: the point is that a handful of pages should not be the exception.

## Enable / Disable

### Disable this rule

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["url/slug-convention"]
```

### Disable all URL Structure rules

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["url/*"]
```

### Enable only this rule

```toml squirrel.toml
[rules]
enable = ["url/slug-convention"]
disable = ["*"]
```