Thanks Tom, yes it's Wordpress - I do manually edit the slug to take out stop words and irrelevant words but sometimes its just not enough.

If I use digital marketing as an example, I may end up having:

contentwhiz.com/content-marketing/keyword-optimisation/optimise-your-blog-posts-with-perfect-keywords

How long is too long? No idea!

I'll just Snapchat Rand and ask him...

p.s. (Sorry if contentwhiz is you!)

A client's site currently uses the URL structure:

www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname%

Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted.  However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this:

www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms

Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons.

So I'm left with a few options:

1. Remove the category from the URL
2. Flatten the category hierarchy
3. Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic.
4. Leave it as it is

What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!

Comprehensive... thanks!

If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea.

However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect?

e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO.

Thanks!

Provided the site isn't spammy and its content and link profile are of a decent quality, I can't forsee any problems.

Besides, what if a website was called freespeech.com? I cant imagine Google seeing that as spammy.