Are long URLs bad for SEO?
-
Hi,
I would like to know how bad is the long URLs that I have on my website.
At the moment we have 543 long urls and I was wondering how big is the impact in my SEO.
Thank you
-
After 512 pixels, Google will truncate your URL in search results pages. A good rule of thumb is to keep your URLs as short as you can, without losing their general meaning.
-
thanks you for information
-
I am about 100% sure that had to with applying your keyword into the URL. I still haven't really been able to find any concrete information on how having to long of a keyword effects rankings. I currently have a customer who decided to put all these dimensions into his product URL's making them way to long. I just want to know if it's worth the work to go in and shorten all of those and remove the dimensions.
-
Good question, I have about 300 pages with long URL, but I wonder, what is better here, to have long URLs or a lot of 301 redirects? Which option will make less harm?
Thanks
-
Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-
When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.
Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".
In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Naked link anchors or long tail anchors ?
Hi, Do naked link anchors such as "www.mysite.com/my-category" have the same SEO power as long tails anchors? What about the UX which such anchors? Lately a site published our back-to-school article with this horrible naked link anchor, it does not look friendly to me as a reader, but I am wondering whether I should bother, how important it is for google and for readers? Thank you in advance. Isabelle
Link Building | | isabelledylag0 -
Outbound links for SEO
A colleague of mine is arguing that having the right outbound links on your website is important for SEO. It seems to me that it would help Google and other SEs to categorize your site, but it wouldn't be a significant ranking factor in itself as anyone could do that. This is being used as an argument to keep links on our site linking to theirs. I've not done any experiments with it, however, and the site in question is ranking fairly well currently. I just don't think that's the main ranking factor as they have fairly good backlinks as well. Anyone have direct experience with this sort of argument? Thanks, Tom
Link Building | | TomBristol0 -
Are reciprocal links bad (if overused)
Hi, is it possible that having too many reciprocal links on my website may cause damage to my SEO campaign? One of my main competitors has a page dedicated to links to other pretty relevant companies (probably around 20 in total) but is doing extremely well. Lots of other relevant websites are allowing me to link to them, in exchange for a link back. How many is too many if so? Thanks! Helen
Link Building | | heleni0 -
Ex-Googler: “To Please Google With Your SEO, Forget About SEO”
Lets discuss, Ex-Googler (Search Quality/Webspam team) talking about SEO. http://searchengineland.com/ex-googler-to-please-google-with-your-seo-forget-about-seo-136800 The bit that got me thinking was 'title tag over optimisation' so what we looking at, shorter title tags with a max of 2 keywords? And the PR quote, does relevance come above PR/DA/PA? Thoughts?
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Local SEO: Citation Consistency
My company manages local SEO campaigns for local-service SMBs (e.g. plumbers, dentists). One of the things we do is claim and manage directory listings. To provide trackable results, we apply tracking phone numbers to the directory listings, but those phone numbers don't match the phone number listed on the client's site. So we have a problem from a citation consistency standpoint. On the one hand, we'd like everything to be consistent -- business name, address and phone number -- to achieve citation consistency. On the other hand, we want to prove the value of what we're doing by showing the client data from tracked phone calls. Can we provide best-practice Local SEO and Maps Optimization - and achieve citation consistency - even if we're introducing inconsistency by using tracking numbers?
Link Building | | Aspirant10 -
How to find all banklinks for a URL that forwards to a main URL
I have a client (yea! my second one doing seo) who has a law firm. He has a main site and then another site that just forwarded to his main website. He wants to find all the directories (and other places on the web) where his second site is listed. At the time when he was adding his firm into the directories, he was using his secondary url but now he wants to go back and use his main website. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a log of every place he added himself. I tried just searching Google for "mysecondarywebsite.com" (in quotes)for example but the SERPS return listings that aren't right. Suggestions?
Link Building | | Czubmeister0 -
When good domain names go bad
We have created a website to distribute a niche product. About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name. We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links. Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off. Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Negative SEO
It looks like either opensiteexplorer is broken or two of our domains are being spammed via negative seo with very low quality links:
Link Building | | Beatbuster
http://winter.bergleben.at is a project pretty new in development. Last time I checked we had 39 linking root domains. Now - couple of weeks later - we have more than 800 linking root domains. Most of them very dubious ones. Problem is: the link anchors look correct of what we or a user would typically link to most of the URLs identified by OSE I cannot even find a link back to us on there If it weren`t for the correct link anchors I would consider something wrong with OSE.
Another URL affected is www.skiinfo.de We are very proud of our quality and organic approach to editorial journalism, but we are in a very competitive field, so I would not be surprised if someone would apply negative SEO against us. Can someone briefly look into it and tell me if they came up with the same issue?0