Google's John Mueller said putting the category name or topic name in your URL slug has zero impact on your rankings. I am not 100% sure if he really meant ZERO but he used a GIF that says ZERO.
Here is the set of tweets on Twitter so you can see it yourself:
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 9, 2021
I mean, Google did say both in 2021 and 2020 that keywords in URLs have a minimal impact - not zero impact - after the page is indexed. But I guess it is close to zero?
The question here was "How important it is to have a Category/Topic in the URL slug?" Just said ZERO.
Update: New tweet on this topic from John:
If you want a short answer to whether you should use "words" in URLs, I'd say yes. They're usually free, the SEO effect is mostly neutral, they're rarely visible in browsers, but they can sometimes help users.
— 🫕 John 🫕 (@JohnMu) December 21, 2021
Added up: 0+0+0+0.1 > 0
Forum discussion at Twitter.
