Url too long
-
Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture
Our domain name does not have office furniture in it.
So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat
to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category
However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls
I am wondering whether we should change back :
For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks
Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks
Or am I going to confuse matters even more?
I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product
I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc
-
if the URL is too long, then what you have to think is it too long to mention on a business card?
Could it be used on the side of a van?
So, if you are just about to start a business, you might want to use a shorter URL because it's easy to remember if it's written on, say, a company card
-
I agree with Gaston 100%... not only that but changing your URL is not only a major pain in the butt, if not done properly can severely hurt your SEO.
-
Hi there!
There is nothing to worry about URL length. It was said by John Mueller that: SHORTER URLS AREN'T GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN SEARCH - Deepcrawl Webmasters Hangouts notes 07/13/18
That said, I'd suggest you stick with the current URL structure. Think as Google likes coherence, so having a well-designed architecture in your information serves well to Google, although Google Search Algorithms can understand both structures.
Yeap, don't change too much your structure, like 301 redirects cause Google to spend more time and you could be having redirect chains that if goes higher than 5 hops Google bot will stop crawling them.If you still mind about long URLs, think on how some subfolders names can be shrunk and avoid repeating words. Look at the example you gave us: domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks
2x office, 2x corner, 2x desks, it could probably be like domain.com/office-furniture/corner-desks/beechHope it helps.
Best luck
GR
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Wordpress: Why do the URLs of my posts keep changing to match the posts titles?
I'll try to keep this brief. The URLs of my posts keep snapping back to exactly match their post titles, no matter how often I try to change them. e.g. title: How to Tie Your Shoelaces desired URL: tie-shoelaces BUT actual URL: how-to-tie-your-shoelaces Anyone come across/ resolved this issue before?
On-Page Optimization | | GerardAdlum0 -
URL structure for professional services across multiple industries
I am working with a company who does consulting work across multiple industries, but the services are essentially the same. Example Services: They implement "Customer Relationship Management" systems and "Data Archiving" Solutions. Example Industries: The services above can each apply to "Oil & Gas" or "Retail". Example URL Structures: mysite.com/oil-gas <-- This page would also contain links to all of the services provided to the Oil & Gas industry. mysite.com/oil-gas/customer-relationship-management-system mysite.com/retail mysite.com/retail/customer-relationship-management-system This seems like the best way to go, as long as i'm writing unique content, for each industry, for each service (i.e. I need to explain how a CRM solution solves specific problems in retail and OTHER specific problems in Oil & Gas). While there will certainly be some overlap, this approach seems logical to me. The URL length isn't too long either, which is nice. The company currently solely focuses on services in URL structure (not a very deep site): mysite.com/customer-relationship-management-system mysite.com/data-archiving Since they have already worked with hundreds of clients in multiple industries, it seems smarter to start focusing more on individual customer segments. Would anyone else do this differently? Thanks, Alex
On-Page Optimization | | MeasureEverything0 -
When You Add a Robots.txt file to a website to block certain URLs, do they disappear from Google's index?
I have seen several websites recently that have have far too many webpages indexed by Google, because for each blog post they publish, Google might index the following: www.mywebsite.com/blog/title-of-post www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag1 www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag2 www.mywebsite.com/blog/category/categoryA etc My question is: if you add a robots.txt file that tells Google NOT to index pages in the "tag" and "category" folder, does that mean that the previously indexed pages will eventually disappear from Google's index? Or does it just mean that newly created pages won't get added to the index? Or does it mean nothing at all? thanks for any insight!
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Should I rewrite all my URLs ?
Hi all, I'm pretty new here and this is a question I'm struggling with since years ! All my URLs are very long. Years ago I wanted to put as many keywords as possible but today I'm not sure anymore it was such a good idea. Example: http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/album-groupe-Take_Me_To_Janus-nom_album-Ripping_the_Heart_from_the_Chest_of_the_Earth-l-en.html The problem is I have more than 300K of these pages. I'm afraid to create a huge mess even if I 301 them all to the new pages. What's your opinion ? Is it worth the effort ? Many thanks in advance for your precious help !
On-Page Optimization | | kivanSOM0 -
Can we listed URL on Website sitemap page which are blocked by Robots.txt
Hi, I need your help here. I have a website, and few pages are created for country specific. (www.example.com/uk). I have blocked many country specific pages from Robots.txt file. It is advisable to listed those urls (blocked by robots.txt) on my website sitemap. (html sitemap page) I really appreciate your help. Thanks, Nilay
On-Page Optimization | | Internet-Marketing-Profs0 -
Long or Short URLs. Who's Coming to Dinner?
This has been discussed on the forums in some regard. My situation. Example 1 Long Keyword URL: www.abctown.com/keyword-for-life-helping-keywords-everywhere-rank-better Example 2 Short Keyword URL: www.abctown.com/keyword In both examples I want to improve rankings for the "keyword" phrase. My current URL is example 1. And I've landed a page one ranking in Google (7) with that URL. In attempts to improve rankings further (top 5), I was toying with the idea of going simpler with all my URLs in favor of the example 2 model. Might this method help or hurt my current rankings? In recent articles I've read it seems that going with the simpler more human approach to my SEO efforts. Any thought would be appreciated. Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | creativedepartment0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0