Urls Too Long - Should I shorten?
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On the crawl of our website we have had a warning that 157 have urls that are too long.
When I look at the urls they are generally from 2016 or earlier. Should I just leave them as they are or shorten the urls and redirect to new url?
Thanks
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Long URLs is a pet peeve! But I agree with Martin on the traffic analogy. Modify the pages that need the most help and measure against the pages you do not change.
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Look at the potential, are these URLs that you currently are receiving search traffic for. If that isn't the case I would hesitate on changing them as it's work that might not provide you with any benefit.
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If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.
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