Are long URLs bad for SEO?
-
Hi,
I would like to know how bad is the long URLs that I have on my website.
At the moment we have 543 long urls and I was wondering how big is the impact in my SEO.
Thank you
-
After 512 pixels, Google will truncate your URL in search results pages. A good rule of thumb is to keep your URLs as short as you can, without losing their general meaning.
-
thanks you for information
-
I am about 100% sure that had to with applying your keyword into the URL. I still haven't really been able to find any concrete information on how having to long of a keyword effects rankings. I currently have a customer who decided to put all these dimensions into his product URL's making them way to long. I just want to know if it's worth the work to go in and shorten all of those and remove the dimensions.
-
Good question, I have about 300 pages with long URL, but I wonder, what is better here, to have long URLs or a lot of 301 redirects? Which option will make less harm?
Thanks
-
Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-
When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.
Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".
In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!
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
-
Media Kit for SEO?
I am working with a company that gets a significant amount of press, but often we do not get links from these articles or the articles do not have the best anchor text. Any suggestion, tools, or articles that help optimize this exposure to for seo benefits?
Link Building | | jkosarek0 -
Is it SEO OK if i cloak internal links and put them in sidebar ?
Hi, I just want to know if i cloak internal link/url and put them in sidebar? Basically i am looking out to cloak below url which contains parameter http://example.com/?tag=tag1+tag2 TO http://example.com/someword/sometagtag Is it SEO acceptable ? Thanks, Raj
Link Building | | RajeshB0 -
Are these links to my site bad?
I am the owner of two diffrent ecommerce sites. Lets call them A and B. Site A is a larg site with ower 5000 pages. In the footer off site A there is a link to site B. Is it bad for site B to get 5000 links (to homepage) from site A? Should i remove these types off links? Thanks for your help!
Link Building | | Spletnafuzija0 -
How to do SEO for a social networking site?
Howdy SEOmoz fans, We are about to launch an educational social networking site. We have planned a lot of good strategies for offline and online marketing. Coming to SEO, how we can do search engine optimization effectively for our social networking site. The home page will be sign up page and there wont be any content in it. It would be great if you can suggest us prefect SEO tactics for our site. Thank you.
Link Building | | jjv0 -
SEO Firm recommendations?
I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a quality SEO company that focuses primarily on building links on high quality sites? So many of the SEO firms are too slick with their sales people and content analysis and research and reports & B.S. What I'd like is an honest company who will simply help me acquire high quality links. Any SEO companies out there that can help??? Most SEO companies are also way too expensive. I'm looking for quality @ a value. Can anyone help?
Link Building | | applesofgold0 -
Has Anyone used Eyeflow SEO out of Pittsburgh
We are looking to have a third party do some white hat link building for us because we currently do not have the resources to do so in house and do not want to rush into a hire. We are looking at eyeflow because they are local to our area and we would have the opportunity to personally see how they do things. Has anyone had any experience with them, or have any suggestions for things to ask or be weary of? Thanks
Link Building | | ClaytonKendall1 -
SEO baklink tracking
Is there an easy way, through passing variables in a URL, to track the links from a specific blog post? I am looking into using a query on the Google search that would return a list of the site that have been indexed that link using that specific query. Thanks!
Link Building | | insitegoogle0 -
Is it important to have a geo modifier for local SEO link building?
If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for: "city + Keyword" and just the "keyword". When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?
Link Building | | dignan990