URL length does it really make a difference
-
I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects. Should I edit old material? My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.
-
I don't know what happened to the url. Sorry about that. Try copying this and pasting it into a browser window:
-
Mike, I'm getting a 404 when I try to visit that page and find out the context of the example. Their example doesn't make much sense, as having subfolders like "direct" really aren't telling you if the traffic is direct.
I agree that it is better to not have a site 10 layers deep, but it's also beneficial to not have 20 parameters on a URL.
However, considering the OP is on Wordpress, I imagine we're talking about the post structure where you have the date as part of the URL. If the site in question is the recipe site from your profile, the following URL doesn't seem too horribly bad.
http://www.copykat.com/2009/02/07/cheddar-chicken-spaghetti/
However, if you're redesigning anyway and want a cleaner URL, you may want to consider a structure that does not include the date. The date really doesn't hold a lot of meaning in this case. I honestly don't care if your spaghetti recipe is two weeks old or five years old when I'm looking for a recipe. I use the Redirection plugin on my Wordpress site, and that plugin has been updated a bit more recently than the other plugin listed so might work a little better with the newer versions. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Would love to see other comments and opinions.
-
Hi Stephanie,
If you do end up re-writing your URLs there is a very useful plugin here;
http://www.techzene.com/wordpress-tips/change-url-structure-wordpress/
It'll make sure your site doesn't produce thousands of 404 errors when people are finding your site via old backlinks/google
-
No.
It's what you do with it that counts! Way-hey!
-
url length per se, no, but URI structure, yes. You should not have your site designed 10 layers deep, for example. There's a discussion of it here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm and I like this example they give:
/readme.php?source=direct&page=34&articletype=widgetingforests&loc=uk
should rank better than:
/readme-source-direct-page-34-articletype-widgetingforests-loc-uk.html
or
/readme/source/direct/page-34/articletype/widgetingforests/loc-uk/
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 -
Backlink URL: With or Without WWW?
When it comes to backlinks. Does it matter with or without WWW? For example my website is without WWW and I backlink with WWW, will it still affect my website rank?
On-Page Optimization | | Japracool0 -
URL Keyword Variations?
I'm aware that keywords in the url aren't as effective as they used to be, but I'm still convinced that they do have a significant impact (based on results in one of the niches I'm in). My question is, will variations of keywords and "hidden" keywords have as much value as an exact keyword? For example, let's say that I'm trying to target the keyword "day." Will including variations like "daily" in the url work just as well? What about a brand name that includes the keyword hidden in its name, like "Dayest"? And, as a followup question, does including "stop" words have any effect? For example, if I'm trying to target the keyword "Day of the Month", would including "day" and "month" in the url be just as effective as including "day of the month"?
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Dates in URL's
I have an issue of duplicate content errors and duplicate page titles which is penalising my site. This has arisen because a number of URLs are suffixed by date(s) and have been spidered . In principle I do not want any url with a suffixed date to be spidered. Eg:- www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm/06_07_13/13_07_13 http://www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm/20_07_13/27_07_13 Only this URL should be spidered:- http://www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm I have over 10,000 of these duplicates and firstly wish to remove them on block from Google ( not one by one ) and secondly wish to amend my robots.txt file so the URL's are not spidered. I do not know the format for either. Can anyone help please.
On-Page Optimization | | carbisbayhols0 -
Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags
I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme. Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have. Is there any reason why this is a problem? I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue? Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Removing old URLs from Google
Hello, I am sure that this question has been asked many times, but I am still not sure what to do about the following: Our site's URL structure has changed a few times in the past few months. Recenty, we have changed our URLs to become more SEO friendly. However, Google has indexed the old URLs as well. To give an example: The following page in our website shows the following URLs in Google Webmaster Tools: Confúcio e Seus Ensinamentos /artigo/68_38/2/as_religioes_iv_confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/1_14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/_14_6132/Vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/ensino/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/ The correct URL is the last one. What should I do about the other ones? Almost all the pages in our website have this problem. We have redirected the old URLs to the new ones, but is there anything else we should do? We were asking Google to remove them, but Google has informed us that it has reached the limit. Please advise us on waht we should do. We have removed the old sitemap with the old URLs. What else must we do? Thank you very much.
On-Page Optimization | | Tev0 -
URL extensions naming
I have always wrote URL extensions as www.mysite.com/two_words.html .... when I need to separate two words, I use _ as the separator ... I am a first time SEO Moz user ... I While looking around the tools on SEO Moz, I happened to stumble across the on-page analysis. A great tool indeed, rather worryingly though, one issue it flagged to me was my URL extension "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." Can someone advice me if this really is a problem, its just not this project, its tons of sites I have already developed that I am also worried about ... I always write file extensions with more than one word using _ to separate the words. How should I write the extension, I am almost embarrassed to ask this question ... Surely, even Google's algorithms are not smart enough to decipher two words without some some sort of spacing .... Regards J
On-Page Optimization | | Johnny4B0 -
Absolute vs relative urls
Hello, Should absolute or relative urls to be used for the internal links? I heard mixed opinions on that: One source claims that web crawlers prefer absolute urls as they are more understandable Other source points that there is no difference for web crawlers what urls are used and relative urls are shorter which reduces the size of a page. Which option is recommended? Many thanks Darius
On-Page Optimization | | LinenMe0