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?
-
Hi there,
The general rule of thumb for URLs is that if the structure and layout makes sense from a user perspective then I wouldn't worry about losing any sleep over this.
A good guide to this can be found here (done by Mr Fishkin himself!) - https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
I hope this helps!
-
Hello,
As you said if it's not too crazy, for example slightly longer I wouldn't purposely change it for that sole reason. However, this might be a good opportunity to find what organic keywords that particular page is ranking for in the 5~10 position, then maybe you can refine your keyword, page content as well as URL to achieve a better ranking for the keyword with potential.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Joseph Yap -
If the current url's are sef (search engine friendly), and not bugging you, leave as is. If the url path is not sef, just implement 301's to a sef url. URL's do have an impact on ctr's in organics, so it may be worth polishing them up. Good luck!
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
-
301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
Multiple 301 redirects and old site content appearing in Google results
I have found that for some Google searches the old version of the site on a completely different domain is appearing on page one of the results, while the newer site is only on page 3. The old site is redirecting to the new site with a 301 redirect, however there is also an additional redirect on the new site to force SSL. Despite this when you view the Google cache of the result that appears in Google the content of the page is still the old site. Is this normal or is Google not following the chain of 301 redirects? Edit: I just found out that downloading the page by right clicking a link and clicking download rather than viewing it in a browser leads to the old site appearing and the 301 redirect not being followed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freshleafmedia0 -
URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
Hi Guys, I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain. eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team). For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this : Here are our questions: Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs) Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords) If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact? Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios) Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this? I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation. Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Myntra0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0 -
301 Redirect and Webmaster Central
I've been working on removing canonical issues. My host is Apache. Is this the correct code for my htaccess? RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spkcp111
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^luckygemstones.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L] SECOND!!! I have two websites under Google's Webmaster Central; http://luckygemstones.com which gets NO 404 soft errors... AND http://www.luckygemstones.com which has 247 soft 404 errors... I think I should DELETE the http://luckygemstones.com site from Webmaster Central--the 301 redirect handles the"www" thing. Is this correct? I hate to hose things (even worse?) Help! Kathleen0 -
Cannot 301 redirect, alternatives?
Hi, the company has changed it's name so now under a different domain. All pages have been 301 redirected on a 1:1 basis apart from the home page. For some reason IT cannot 301 redirect the old home page to the new website home page. At suggestions? Perhaps canonical it? Meantime the old home page copy has been changed to say the company name has changed and a link to the new website. Any help greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
How long until my correct url is in the serps?
We changed our website including urls. We setup 301 redirects for our pages. Some of the pages show up as the old url and some the new url. When does that change?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0