URL too long. Shorten and redirect, or leave alone?
-
MOZ is indicating that i have several URLs that are too long.
Should I shorten the URLs and redirect the long URLs to the new, shorter, URL? Or should i leave them alone, as I've been reading to avoid redirects.
-
Shorten and Redirect (With keeping the URL keyword-focused). If there is an opportunity for those website pages to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and spend a few minutes optimizing them as well.
You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one, and then re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.
We have seen good results from doing this on our website and it can be an easy win to bumping up rankings for those pages.
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
URL Change, Old URLs Still In Index
Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
IP redirects
My website, on a .com domain, displays a different language/content depending on the IP of the user. For example, if someone is browsing my web from Spain, it will show the spanish content, and so on. Does anyone has an idea on how will Google index my pages? Their servers being located in the US, I assume the bot will only crawl and index the english content. How can I tell the bots to do the same for the other languages/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Alemoto0 -
Redirect
Hello, I need to redirect just the homepage of my blog somewhere. So blog.com But there are other redirects in there and I don't want to override them. So blog.com/post.html How do I just redirect the homepage of wordpress page without redirecting all the other pages. This is what I did that recreated the issue. redirect 301 / blog2.com Thanks! Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirect everything from a certain url
I have a new domain (www.newdomain.com) and and an old domain (www.olddomain.com). Currently both domains are pointing (via dns nameserves) at the new site. I want to 301 everything that comes from the www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com. I've used this htaccess code RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.newsite.com$
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] Which works fine and redirects if someone visits www.olddomain.com but I want it to cover everything from the old domain such as www.olddomain.com/archives/article1/ etc. So if any subpages etc are visited from the old domain its redirected to the new domain. Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks0 -
Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?
I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?
Technical SEO | | upick-1623910 -
How to make multiple url redirection using global.asax in IIS 6?
sir, I am working with IIS 6 site and i ant to redirect three different urls of a domain to one url, i.e, there are the different versions of the same url...so how can i create one? I have found a script on google. but it says redirecting one url. see it here: Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender as Object, ByVal e as EventArgs) Try Dim requestedDomain As String = HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.ToString().toLower() If InStr(requestedDomain, "http://yoursite.com") Then requestedDomain = requestedDomain.Replace("http://yoursite.com", "http://www.yoursite.com") Response.Clear() Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader("Location", requestedDomain) Response.End() End If Catch ex As Exception Response.Write("Error in Global.asax :" & ex.Message) End Try End Sub
Technical SEO | | VipinLouka780