In the Google hangout from last week on Google+ at the 17:50 minute mark John Mueller of Google said that keywords in the URL is a “very small ranking factor.”

The question: “Keyword in the URL, is that a ranking factor?”

The answer:

Here is the video embed:

Note, this is nothing new, we covered it back in 2006, and we ran a poll in 2009. Google has said it is not worth changing your URLs to get keywords in them.

So if you build a new page or site, then go with keywords but don’t spam it out.

Forum discussion at Google+.