Long URL's
-
So I'm super new at SEO and learning a lot. I'm a small business owner and enjoy doing it myself.
Are long URL's good or bad?
Like this:
Is that too long? The german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls is an actual page with actual content.
Do those hurt me?
-
Excellent questions thanks.
I wish to further the question by asking if Google or Bing actually penialise you for long url such as in the original question or as in my own site: http://www.ditalia.com.au/wedding-dress-wedding-dresses-and-bridal-gowns-designed-and-made
Do the SE's look in the urls for the search terms? I was told they no-longer do that.
-
Just to clarify, 70 characters is a good rule of thumb for title tags, however that limit is largely in place due to the number of characters that Google displays in search results.
I personally think 80-100 is a good rule of thumb for maximum length on a URL but it's not always feasible, and the best practice for URLs is not as clearly delineated as title tags.
-
Hi Joshua,
There's not a perfect cutoff mark as far as URL length. In general, I try to clearly identify the keyword targeted as the page URL, and stick to one subfolder, or occassionally 2 subfolders on a larger site. Beyond that, I try to avoid being redundant, which is the biggest issue with the example you presented - you should try not to duplicate long strings inside the URL - in this case using "german-shepherd-puppies" twice is what makes it too long and redundant.
Assuming you want to target the keyword "Long Haired German Shepherd Puppies", I would rather see a URL like one of these:
- http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/
- http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/
Then for the actual page for Lava or one of the other dogs you'd probably do one of these:
- http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/lava/
- http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/lava/
That is an effective URL that isn't too keyword stuffed and isn't redundant.
Taking a further look at the site, you could also consider options like these:
-
Hi Joshua
A lot of SEO's recommend 70 characters or less, unless you are seeking particular long tail key word combinations. I agree
I recommend you read the following articles:
In particular the title tags section: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development
and this blog post http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
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
-
Redirect chains error on the home page URL
Hello Everyone, I'm getting redirect chains error on the home page URL:
On-Page Optimization | | Nikhil_Falcon
http://ebitdacatalyst.com in Wordpress. I've checked my redirection list in the plugin, and haven't found any redirections on http://ebitdacatalyst.com. Can anyone please help me in solving this issue? I don't know where from it's coming.0 -
How important are clean URLs?
Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness. Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?
On-Page Optimization | | Gavo1 -
Reducing the site's header to get more content Above the Fold
The user bizzer posted the following question on the post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-ads😞 "I've got my above the fold area very light on advertising since Panda. But reading #4 about the "template" makes me wonder if I should go further and reduce the height of my header area and maybe even remove one of my two sidebars, so as to increase the content-to-template ratio above the fold. Make sense?" What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | rpedri0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
How long after a URL starts showing a 404 does Google stop crawling?
Before hiring me to do SEO, a client re-launched their site and did not 301 the old URLs to the new. Only the home page URL stayed the same. For a month after the re-launch, the old URLs returned a 404. For the next month, all 404 pages (basically any non-existent URL) were 301'd to the home page. Finally, 2 months after launching, they properly 301'd the old URLs to the new. Now, the new URLs are not ranking well. I assume it's too late to realize any benefit from the 301's, just checking to see if anybody has any insight into how long Google keeps trying to crawl old/404/improperly 301'd URLs. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | AndrewMiller0 -
Why isn't Google indexing me?
Recently got handed off a .org site for a quasi state agency here in Michigan. Turns out the developer had the site live for the past six months but left the noindex, nofollow tag on everything so the site was invisible to search engines. Obviously we wiped all of those things a couple weeks ago when we got started, added all of our sitemaps to bing/yahoo/google webmaster tools and we've already started getting indexed by yahoo and bing and showing up for branded terms...but NOTHING from Google. WMT says our pages are all indexed, but we aren't showing up for anything in search and we don't seem to be indexed at all. Granted, if this site was brand new and didn't have any links I could see us taking a little time to get found, but this site has very good .gov and .edu links, plus we've built some other solid links to it since we've launched and Google continues to ignore it. I haven't seen this before, but could Google still be ignoring us from the months of noindex, nofollowing? If so, any tips on how to get back in teh Google's good graces here?
On-Page Optimization | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20