Should I shorten my urls?
-
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?
-
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!
-
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
- Create a few hard coded new pages over the next month
- Track them against the current pages
- 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 -
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.
-
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.
-
ahh... this question is getting messy...
I don't know exactly how the rel-canonical tag will work in this situation.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
What to do with dynamically translated content sharing same urls?
We've just added to an originally English website, Italian and German translations. User can switch between them with right hand drop down language selection menu; then the entire page will be translated (including menu, body, footer) but the urls remain the same. The Italian page have some meta data (titles and descriptions) translated as well. Is it going to be a significantly negative effect on SEO to have the translated pages sharing the same urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D2i0 -
URL structure change and xml sitemap
At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang0 -
Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere
I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
How and When Should I use Canonical Url Tags?
Pretty new to the SEO universe. But I have not used any canonical tags, just because there is not definitive source explaining exactly when and why you should use them??? Am I the only one who feels this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenrushdaily0 -
Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
Hello folks, We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website. The same content is currently accessible from two URLs: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented. The updated URL structure will look like something like this: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure. Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content? Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course). If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn /autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.0 -
URL Optimisation Dilemma
First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one. I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them. My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created. The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below: http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following: http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this. As a compromise, I am considering the following: http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag. Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Canonical Issue with urls
I saw some urls of my site showing duplicate page content, duplicate page title issues on crawl reports. So I have set canonical url for every urls , that has dupicate content / page title. But still SeoMoz crawl test is showing issue. I am giving here one url with issue. The below given urls shown duplicate content and duplicate page title with some other urls all are given below. Checked URL http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7635 dup page content http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 dup page Title http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 But I have set canonical url for all these urls already , that is :- http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 This should actually solve the problem right ? Search engine should identify the canonical url as original url and only should consider that. Thanks0 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0