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URL Length affecting SEO? how to fix it?

by acatmusic
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a site and recently began reading more about the effect of the length of the URLs on the SERP of my site.

1) I want to ask if that has been the case in your experience (shorter URL leading to better SERP)?

2) I have already done some considerable link building to the long urls so can you guys recommend a WP plugin that can redirect the link juice from the long url to a new short one (or any method of redirecting the link juice to a new shorter URL)? (or if you guys can recommend a solution so that i dont waste all the links i have already created)

3) is it worth trying to shorten the URL? do i stand to gain more by using some re-direct to a short url or will i lose rank by redirecting?

Thanks for the help
#affect #affecting #fix #lenght #seo #url
  • Profile picture of the author wskinner
    In my experience yes longer URL's are not liked to much by search engines, not sure why it just is so. I have never heard of a plugin that can pass link juice onto a redirect URL. It depends on what type of links you are creating. if they are good quality content links that drive traffic to your site you are not wasting them in the sense that you might be getting traffic from them.

    I would personally stick with what you are doing with the long URL. If it is a exact match keyword URL then I wouldn't worry about it to much as you should still be able to rank for the keyword in the URL.

    Hope This Helped
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  • Profile picture of the author PBScott
    I have a hundred or so URLs that are long and often beyond the character limit of what might be post-able on most forums. It is defiantly a detriment for people trying to share your information, however Google seems to be able to read them all fine.

    If you wanted you could redirect them all server side with a 301 to new, shorter URLs. It will pass on any backlink power they have.
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  • Profile picture of the author Hansons
    You should check url formation of about.com to get an overview how you can make short url....
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  • Profile picture of the author acatmusic
    So doing 301 redirects from long URL to short one should pass the link juice to the new short URL? Can you guy recommend a wp plug in to do this? I have searched plug ins on WP to do this and have found a few but I want to see if you guys have had any good experiences with a particular plug in.
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    This is 2013, people. And soon to be 2014. You people are living
    in 1995. Url length? Who gives a rip? Who says google cares?

    have any of you people actually looked at the length of urls on common
    websites? Like the wf? Look at the length of this thread:
    warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/837859-url-length-affecting-search-engine-optimization-how-fix.html

    118+ characters....

    I doubt if any of you will get anywhere near 2,048...

    Has nothing to do with SEO, really, it's your server settings...
    and/or browser. Sometimes your server may limit them, but
    that again was about 1995...Any good browser will allow the
    2048.

    No way would anyone ever get to 2048 unless they were an idiot.

    I can't imagine anyone trying to post a url that was over 2,000 friggin
    characters long....!?!?!?

    Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author acatmusic
    Paul,

    While i cant be 100% sure that long url affects SEO i see that most urls ranking for my KWs are a lot shorter (for example: website.com/kw than the URL im trying to rank so that seemed like some sort of evidence pointing at the fact that length might have some effect. I wanted to see what the consensus was here before acting though
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    • Profile picture of the author SiL^Er_HunTeR
      I believe that URL length does have a significant impact on SEO. It seems that shorter URLs rank better and more quickly, and longer URLs take longer to rank even if they have better content and higher quality backlinks.
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      • Profile picture of the author acatmusic
        Originally Posted by SiL^Er_HunTeR View Post

        I believe that URL length does have a significant impact on SEO. It seems that shorter URLs rank better and more quickly, and longer URLs take longer to rank even if they have better content and higher quality backlinks.
        I have long urls currently, can you suggest a way to fix this without losing all the linking ive done to the longer URLs? (I have a WP site)
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  • Profile picture of the author WareTime
    I use blogger so I get what they give. Works out fine. On my own static sites, I use numbers. as in example.com/1.html That works great too and has other advantages too.

    Google doesn't need anything in the url these days. Think-of-all-the-keyword-stuffed-urls-out-there-these-days-do-you-really-think-google-even-pays-attention-to-them-anymore/

    I don't.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rehmat
    Who says Google doesn't care about the URL length? When you fill up your URL with useless words, the URL gets lengthy and your main keywords are hidden. And keywords in URL play the most important role..
    So I use Custom Permalinks plugin on my blog to write short and keyword rich URLs for my post. You can use Redirection plugin to apply 301 redirects for the old posts. But I would suggest, leave the old posts and work on newer ones to make their URLs shorten.
    (Regarding with WF and About.com, their ranking can't be compared with any recently started blog. Even a crappy article on these sites will beat several super optimized articles under the same niche on several new blogs.)
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  • Profile picture of the author danlew
    [DELETED]
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  • Profile picture of the author spyindia
    Hi Guys, I believe that your url should be user friendly & search engine friendly, then you have no need to worry about it. You will always get good results.
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