Should I shorten my urls?
-
For my informational site I have a lot of urls that are way too long. When I first created the site, I wrote a script that takes out the common words of a post and fashions a url. So, for example, if the first few words of a question were:
Hi there, I have a question about back pain. I'm wondering what drugs would be good for relief and how I can get some help?
then my url may be:
www.mydomain.com/question?id=123-question-back-pain-wondering-drugs-good-relief-how-get-some-help
Once I got learning about seo I realized that these urls were too long but I never did anything about them. Should I be shortening these, or is my time best spent doing something else?
-
That is brilliant Marcus. The if-else idea regarding the ID makes so much sense. I will leave the old ones as is and change the ones from this point on.
Thanks!
p.s. I noticed that seomoz does the same thing with the Q&A urls. This one's not too long because I asked a short question but some of the question urls in here are quite long!
-
Hey
That's a solid point from EGOL - if there are ones that are working well at the moment, don't rock the boat and look to improve new content. The dynamic thing does make it a bit more tricky but really, it should not be a massive problem.
If your URLs are generated by the script and you have some kind of ID relating to the content you are adding it should be easy enough to put something in place that uses better quality URLs for new content.
If contentID > x Then
Build new URL Structure
Else
Build old URL Structure
End
Whether you do this entirely in the code or with some URL rewriting to add polish is up to you and in some part depends on how things work on your back end but...
Where there is a will there is a way and if you can shorten future URLs it will provide some benefit.
Maybe you could do some testing to see if it is going to be worth your while
- Create a few hard coded new pages over the next month
- Track them against the current pages
- see if there is a statistical improvement in clicks, conversions, impressions etc
I am pretty much of the opinion that if you can change them going forward, you should as they are not brilliant at the moment but I would not expect miracles from this though so don't bust a blood vessel over it.
Cheers
Marcus -
You could definitely redirect URLs using .htaccess and mod_rewrite. An example rule would be something like
RewriteRule ^q/(.*) /?question=$1
or
RewriteRule ^q/(.*)-(\d+) /?question=$2-$1
See the mod_rewrite documentation or just ask a competent developer about the rules above.
-
I definitely agree with the "messy" thing. Every few months I think, "Oh, I should fix that long url thingy", but then my brain gets shorted out trying to think of how to do it. I wanted to do a htaccess redirect but because the url is written with a php script I just can't figure out how to do it.
Invariably what happens is that I manage to get my mind onto other more exciting things and then I just do nothing and I end up having more and more ugly long urls.
-
ahh... this question is getting messy...
I don't know exactly how the rel-canonical tag will work in this situation.
-
Thanks guys. One of my problems is that all of these urls are generated dynamically. So, I'm thinking of changing the script on that page so that it generates a shorter url. Then, I think I can use the rel-canonical tag to tell Google that the short urls are the ones to use.
If I do that will the long ones drop out of the index?
-
If you can change future URLs without changing the historic URLs then I would leave the old ones "as is". (Meaning... change future but not old ones)
It will take work to change them and if you do a 301 then there might be some link power lost.
I always like to base my decisions at least in part on analytics, so if these pages are pulling nice traffic and ranking in the SERPs then I would not do a thing about the old ones.
Just an opinion.
-
Hey, they are too long and don't really make any sense so... I think they need improving.
In an ideal world your URL should describe the content of the page as it will help win clicks and may give you an SEO boost through links that use the URL itself as the anchor.
Shorten them though, should be easy enough and certainly gives a usability boost.
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
-
URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect
We have a small number of content pages where the urls paths were setup before we started looking really hard at SEO. The paths are longer than recommended (but not super crazy IMHO) and some of the pages get a decent amount of traffic. Moz suggests updating the URLs to make them shorter but I wonder if anyone has experience with the tradeoffs here. Is it better to mark those issues to be ignored and just use good URLs going forward or would you suggest updating the URLs to something shorter and implementing a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | russell_ms0 -
¿Disallow duplicate URL?
Hi comunity, thanks for answering my question. I have a problem with a website. My website is: http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1 (good URL) but i have 2 filters to show something and this generate 2 URL's more: http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=true (if we put 1 filter) http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=false (if we put other filter) My question is, should i put in robots.txt disallow for these filters like this: **Disallow: /*?show=***
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Redirecting to Modal URLs
Hi everyone! Long time no chat - hope you're all well! I have a question that for some reason is causing me some trouble. I have a client that is creating a new website, the process was a mess and I am doing a last minute redirect file for them (long story, for another time). They have different teams for different business categories, so there are multiple staff pages with a list of staffers, and a link to their individual pages. Currently they have a structure like this for their staff bios... www.example.com/category-staff/bob-johnson/ But now, to access the staffers bio, a modal pops up. For instance... www.example.com/category-staff/#bob-johnson Should I redirect current staffers URLs to the staff category, or the modal URL? Unfortunately, we are late in the game and this is the way the bio pages are set up. Would love thoughts, thanks so much guys!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
URL Structure Question
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
URLs are not indexed
My website has 0.5 million pages with urls like this- **http://www.mycity4kids.com/Delhi-NCR/collage-painting-classes-%3cnear%3e-shalimar-bagh ****, **none of these urls are indexed. Question 1- What can be the possible reason for this issue? Users see this url as : http://www.mycity4kids.com/Delhi-NCR/collage-painting-classes-<near>-shalimar-bagh</near>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prsntsnh
The symbol "<" and ">" get converted into "%3c" and "%3e" respectively, is this the reason for these urls not getting indexed?0 -
How do I best handle a minor URL change?
My company is about to complete an upgrade to our website but part of this will be changing the URLs slightly. Mainly the .aspx suffix will be dropped off the pages that we're most worried about. The current URLs will automatically redirect to the new pages, will this be enough or will there be an SEO impact? If it helps the site is www.duracard.com and the product pages are the ones we want to keep ranked. For instance if someone searches for "plastic gift cards" our page '<cite>https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards.aspx</cite>' is #3 and we want to make sure it stays that way once we change it to 'https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards'. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrea.G0 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0