Should you shorten very long URLs?
-
Hi Moz Community!
If the nav architecture URL is long, like this:
can I and should I shorten that new destination URL to make it easy for Google to see that the page topic is really the owl, like this:
https://savewildlife.org/endangered-species-list/mexican-spotted-owl
Thank you! Jane
-
That is a long URL, but I don't think shortening it will help in terms of SEO. Google is generally good at understanding the structure of your site without the structure of URLs. They are also good at determining the topic without the use of the URL. In my experience, the work from changing the URL is more than it would help.
If you find a reason to change the URL structure in the future that is very necessary (new CMS as an example), update the structure then. Until then, unless you are getting feedback from your users that it is annoying them, I'd leave them as is.
-
It’s easier than you might expect to set up custom shortened URLs for your brand. Though it might be an extra step to run your links through a link shortener, there are many benefits associated with the practice, including tracking and making URLs easy to remember.
-
Hi Jane!
There is no correct answer here. In the examples you gave there is a big difference between them: The number of folders.
4 folders vs just 1.The are some miths and some experiments stating that both long and short URLs rank really good.
In my opinion, I'd go for a middle in those two: 2-3 folders with less words each folders.You should focus in the experience you are providing the user and if each of those folders represent a section in your site.
This is just a wild guess:
yoursite.com/conservation/endangered-species/birds/mexican-spotted-owl
It looks like /endangered-species-act-protections/ and /endangered-species-list/ are the same category/folder. I'd remove the latter.Hope 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
-
Automatically check if URL has been optimised?
Hi guys, I have a massive list of URLs and want to check if the primary keyword for each URL has been optimised. I'm looking for something similar to Moz on-page grader which grades the URL and primary keyword with a single metric e.g. grade a, b, c However, Moz doesn't offer an API to pull this score automatically. I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can access their API to do something like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Status Codes - Deleted URLs
Hi I have a dev team 'cleaning' their database and from what I can tell deleting old URL's - which they say are not in use. I don't have much visibility on how our URLs are managed in the back end of the site, but my concern is these URLs should never be deleted, they should have a 301, 404 or 410. This includes product pages no longer available and category pages - my concern is losing authority. Am I worrying over nothing or is this a big issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
WIX? How to change URLS and is it any good for SEO
I have Wix website and want to change its url structure, but not able to do so, any one know how to do so?. Does below URLs work for SEO? And Is Wix is good for SEO or not? abc.com/#!how-it-works/c46c abc.com/#!party-event/c1lzb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Using abbreviations in URL - Matching Keyword
We have a website that uses /us/, /ca/, /va/, etc for URLs of the different U.S. states. How much better is it (or is it at all better) to use /california/ or /virginia/ instead in our URLs to rank for searches that include the name of those states?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heydarian0 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0