URL length does it really make a difference
-
I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects. Should I edit old material? My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.
-
I don't know what happened to the url. Sorry about that. Try copying this and pasting it into a browser window:
-
Mike, I'm getting a 404 when I try to visit that page and find out the context of the example. Their example doesn't make much sense, as having subfolders like "direct" really aren't telling you if the traffic is direct.
I agree that it is better to not have a site 10 layers deep, but it's also beneficial to not have 20 parameters on a URL.
However, considering the OP is on Wordpress, I imagine we're talking about the post structure where you have the date as part of the URL. If the site in question is the recipe site from your profile, the following URL doesn't seem too horribly bad.
http://www.copykat.com/2009/02/07/cheddar-chicken-spaghetti/
However, if you're redesigning anyway and want a cleaner URL, you may want to consider a structure that does not include the date. The date really doesn't hold a lot of meaning in this case. I honestly don't care if your spaghetti recipe is two weeks old or five years old when I'm looking for a recipe. I use the Redirection plugin on my Wordpress site, and that plugin has been updated a bit more recently than the other plugin listed so might work a little better with the newer versions. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Would love to see other comments and opinions.
-
Hi Stephanie,
If you do end up re-writing your URLs there is a very useful plugin here;
http://www.techzene.com/wordpress-tips/change-url-structure-wordpress/
It'll make sure your site doesn't produce thousands of 404 errors when people are finding your site via old backlinks/google
-
No.
It's what you do with it that counts! Way-hey!
-
url length per se, no, but URI structure, yes. You should not have your site designed 10 layers deep, for example. There's a discussion of it here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm and I like this example they give:
/readme.php?source=direct&page=34&articletype=widgetingforests&loc=uk
should rank better than:
/readme-source-direct-page-34-articletype-widgetingforests-loc-uk.html
or
/readme/source/direct/page-34/articletype/widgetingforests/loc-uk/
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
-
Should URL contain primary keyword or primary + extended keyword?
Hi All, This is a query regarding what keyword should be placed in URL. Below is the scenario. I have marketplace website where I can service providers with users. I have a page with a list of Dance providers and want to rank it for Dance Classes, Dance Coaching Classes keywords. Since these keywords represent same business purpose for us, should I keep the URL as www.abc.com/dance-classes or www.abc.com/dance-coaching-classes? What is SEO best practice in this scenario? Kindly suggest.
On-Page Optimization | | Avin1230 -
How to fix this URL?
Moz crawl test only show one URL indexed for the website - http://ravisharrma.com/ Site:http://ravisharrma.com/ shows 3 URLs and how to fix URLs for the website?
On-Page Optimization | | Dan_Brown10 -
Should i make all of my pages with canonical tag
Hi, Im using thesis Wordpress theme, and their default option is "Add canonical <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym>s to your site" im just wandering if i should keep that box checked and apply canonical <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym>s to all of my pages? Thank You
On-Page Optimization | | Vmezoz0 -
I am optimizing title tags and was wondering if it makes a difference if I use "commas" in between keywords that are synonyms or should I use "and" instead?
For example: "pants, trousers at pants.com" or "pants and trousers at pants.com".
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Changing url in connection with meta title inconsistency
We run a site, which is a directory type one, where visitors can look for local businesses per city as well (at some point similar to the 'Yelp concept'). Now, we use www.example.com as the homepage, and the www.example.com/city1, where city1 is the capital of our country, is 301 redirected to the homepage, so this is your default setting. When you choose e.g city2, your url changes to www.example.com/city2, and the city value is stored in a cookie. Then, when you leave the session, and return to the site later on, you will see the homepage url, but with your previous choice of city (in case you let cookies be stored). My concern is, that the meta title always contains the chosen city name, so when you return to the website, and you previously used city2, you will now see the homepage url (which normally belongs to city1), but with the meta title of city2 or with any other previously chosen city. Does this mean a problem, and should I always use the correct url, which would be www.example.com/cityX, or this could not cause a problem for me? If it does, would you mind sharing me the exact problems as well? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
New bookingsengine url, what would you do?
A client of mine is introducing a new and improved bookingsengine. They're launching it on a different url than the existing one. The existing one needs to stay online a little bit longer for affiliate purposes. The old engine url has a sitelink in the SERPS and ranks well on a few terms. I'm wondering what you would do in this case? They want the new url to rank as quickly as possible also as sitelink of course. Any help greatly appreciated. I have some thoughts of my own of course... 🙂 But to keep the discussion as wide as possible... I'll wait a bit to add m thoughts.
On-Page Optimization | | YannickVeys0 -
Cononical URL problem
Hello, In the keywords difficulty tool, one of my client's sites has a different number for links to root domain and links to page even though they're both the home page. How do I tell if I have a cononical URL problem, and what do I do about it if I do? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Canonical URL's - Fixed but still negatively impacted
I recently noticed that our canonical url's were not set up correctly. The incorrect setup predates me but it could have been in place for close to a year, maybe a bit more. Each of the url's had a "sortby" parameter on all of them. I had our platform provider make the fix and now everything is as it should be. I do see issues caused by this in Google Webmaster, for instance in the HTML suggestions it's telling me that pages have duplicate title tags when in fact this is the same page but with a variety of url parameters at the end of the url. To me this just highlights that there is a problem and we are being negatively impacted by the previous implementation. My question is has anyone been in this situation? Is there any way to flush this out or push Google to relook at this? Or is this a sit and be patient situation. I'm also slightly curious if Google will at some point look and see that the canonical urls were changed and then throw up a red flag even though they are finally the way they should be. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | dgmiles
Dave0