Google just killed the party for creative URL tricksters. The search giant quietly updated its guidelines to follow IETF STD 66, basically telling SEO teams their clever URL hacks are now trash. No more session IDs in URLs, no funky parameters, just boring predictable structures. Sites ignoring this shift risk tanking their rankings while Google reprocesses everything. Turns out, those “genius” URL experiments everyone loved were actually making crawlers dizzy. The full damage report gets worse.

While most people were busy arguing about AI taking over the world, Google quietly dropped a bombshell on web developers everywhere. They overhauled their URL guidelines, aligning with something called IETF STD 66. Yeah, that’s replacing RFC 3986, which nobody outside of tech circles has heard of anyway.

The changes are pretty brutal. Google’s basically telling developers they’ve been doing URLs wrong this whole time. Those creative URL parameters with colons and brackets? Dead. Google wants boring, predictable query strings now. No more getting cute with double commas or square brackets. Just stick to the format everyone knows: ?category=shoes&sort=price.

Google wants boring, predictable query strings now. No more getting cute with URL parameters.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Session IDs in URLs are officially deprecated. Remember those ugly strings of random characters that made every URL look like a cat walked across the keyboard? Google’s done with them. They want cookies handling sessions now, not URLs. Makes sense, considering session IDs created duplicate content nightmares.

Google’s also getting picky about link structure. They’re pushing root-relative URLs over parent-relative ones. Translation: use /category/product instead of that confusing ../../product mess. Apparently, too many sites were creating infinite crawl loops. Who knew?

The real kicker? Non-ASCII characters need percent encoding. Every emoji, every Chinese character, every Arabic letter needs to be converted to those ugly percentage codes. Google doesn’t care if it makes URLs look like gibberish. They want standardization.

But wait, there’s more stupidity to unpack. Google’s warning against changing URLs just for SEO purposes. They’re basically saying, “Don’t touch your URLs unless you have a really good reason.” Even with proper redirects, you’ll probably tank your rankings temporarily. The search giant admits URL changes generally hurt more than help. John Mueller specifically emphasizes that changing URLs could cause sites to lose visibility until Google reprocesses them completely. Google also made it clear that URLs should use simple words with hyphens instead of cryptic ID numbers, making content more understandable for both users and search engines.

These updates mainly affect developers and SEO teams who’ve been playing fast and loose with URL construction. Google’s message is clear: stop being creative with URLs. Follow the rules or watch your site struggle with crawling issues and wasted crawl budget. The wild west days of URL experimentation are over.