Should I shorten my urls?

[MarieHaynes]

For my informational site I have a lot of urls that are way too long.  When I first created the site, I wrote a script that takes out the common words of a post and fashions a url.  So, for example, if the first few words of a question were:

Hi there, I have a question about back pain. I'm wondering what drugs would be good for relief and how I can get some help?

then my url may be:

www.mydomain.com/question?id=123-question-back-pain-wondering-drugs-good-relief-how-get-some-help

Once I got learning about seo I realized that these urls were too long but I never did anything about them.   Should I be shortening these, or is my time best spent doing something else?

[MarieHaynes]

That is brilliant Marcus.  The if-else idea regarding the ID makes so much sense.  I will leave the old ones as is and change the ones from this point on.

Thanks!

p.s. I noticed that seomoz does the same thing with the Q&A urls.  This one's not too long because I asked a short question but some of the question urls in here are quite long!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

That's a solid point from EGOL - if there are ones that are working well at the moment, don't rock the boat and look to improve new content. The dynamic thing does make it a bit more tricky but really, it should not be a massive problem.

If your URLs are generated by the script and you have some kind of ID relating to the content you are adding it should be easy enough to put something in place that uses better quality URLs for new content.

If contentID > x Then

Build new URL Structure

Else

Build old URL Structure

End

Whether you do this entirely in the code or with some URL rewriting to add polish is up to you and in some part depends on how things work on your back end but...

Where there is a will there is a way and if you can shorten future URLs it will provide some benefit.

Maybe you could do some testing to see if it is going to be worth your while

1. Create a few hard coded new pages over the next month
2. Track them against the current pages
3. see if there is a statistical improvement in clicks, conversions, impressions etc

I am pretty much of the opinion that if you can change them going forward, you should as they are not brilliant at the moment but I would not expect miracles from this though so don't bust a blood vessel over it.

Cheers
Marcus

[TaitLarson]

You could definitely redirect URLs using .htaccess and mod_rewrite.  An example rule would be something like

RewriteRule ^q/(.*) /?question=$1

or

RewriteRule ^q/(.*)-(\d+) /?question=$2-$1

See the mod_rewrite documentation or just ask a competent developer about the rules above.

[MarieHaynes]

I definitely agree with the "messy" thing.  Every few months I think, "Oh, I should fix that long url thingy", but then my brain gets shorted out trying to think of how to do it.  I wanted to do a htaccess redirect but because the url is written with a php script I just can't figure out how to do it.

Invariably what happens is that I manage to get my mind onto other more exciting things and then I just do nothing and I end up having more and more ugly long urls.

[EGOL]

ahh... this question is getting messy...

I don't know exactly how the rel-canonical tag will work in this situation.

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks guys.  One of my problems is that all of these urls are generated dynamically.  So, I'm thinking of changing the script on that page so that it generates a shorter url.  Then, I think I can use the rel-canonical tag to tell Google that the short urls are the ones to use.

If I do that will the long ones drop out of the index?

[EGOL]

If you can change future URLs without changing the historic URLs then I would leave the old ones "as is".   (Meaning... change future but not old ones)

It will take work to change them and if you do a 301 then there might be some link power lost.

I always like to base my decisions at least in part on analytics, so if these pages are pulling nice traffic and ranking in the SERPs then I would not do a thing about the old ones.

Just an opinion.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, they are too long and don't really make any sense so... I think they need improving.

In an ideal world your URL should describe the content of the page as it will help win clicks and may give you an SEO boost through links that use the URL itself as the anchor.

Shorten them though, should be easy enough and certainly gives a usability boost.