Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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!
Nick White
SEO Services KC
https://seo-kansas-city.com/
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 backlink URLs include www, https, or both???
My business is located at remotebaba.com, and I am wanting several sites to link to it.
Link Building | | udaipabla
I am only interested in home page at this point, and we are using HTTPS for our site. Which one of these should I have other sites link to (Please provide complete justification):
remotebaba.com (my root domain)
www.remotebaba.com
https://remotebaba.com
https://www.remotebaba.com I really appreciate your help!1 -
Backlink Transparency with SEO Agency
Hello everyone. I recently started working with an SEO agency and today they gave me an updated keyword report which showed some increase in rankings. I was not aware that any backlinks had been created yet so I asked for a report of the links. Their response is below and I am just wondering if this is normal practice being I have not worked with any type of SEO agency yet. "
Link Building | | wonderd24
Hey Daniel, We release a small report on them which the guest blog team will do soon. We don't reveal all backlink sources unfortunately because people have tried to bother the webmasters we have and basically steal our techniques. But rest assured you will be ranking at the top of the pack with our methods 😃
"1 -
Can affiliate links benefit or hurt my seo?
I have just signed up with a company to do affiliate marketing for my site. I am now in the process of reaching out to publishers and seeing who will publish my link on their site. Is there any benefit in terms of seo for having these links, and can there be any potential downside to these links as well?
Link Building | | whiteonlySEO0 -
A lot of backlinks from outside of niche – bad?
We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg: our.domain/user1 our.domain/user2 … our.domain/user100000 There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages. Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords.. Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.
Link Building | | dsumter0 -
1000 of links on my website ? is it good or bad
Hi guys my site: www.dorchdanola-netbutik.dk is a e-commerce store, and generally we have many links on all pages because of the many products and categories. Im not sure if this is actually bad or good? I've been told that it will definately harm my site when google crawls it. The thing is that google visit my site often and I still have good pageranks in google. So does it actually harm my site having all these products and categories? And what can I do about it if google see every page as duplicate content? I also link to my social pages like FB, G+, e.g. Should I put rel="nofollow" or rel="me" on these social links? Thanks guys!
Link Building | | Dorchdanola0 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
Site URL called out but not clickable.
Hi - I'm after a bit of clarity; if my site URL is referenced in an article, but doesn't actually link through, does this still 'add value' to my seo efforts? Thanks, David
Link Building | | newstd1000 -
Warrior Forum, Is it good for seo?
The Warrior Forum just changed there membership from free to paid. They have do follow attributes but I was wondering what peoples take is on joining them for both learning and seo purposes?
Link Building | | bronxpad0