Have you noticed how long URLs are appearing like a rash on a new born baby’s bottom? I mean the ones with loads of dashes and words in them. The ones that break in emails when you paste them in (something I found annoying today) and that you are never going to remember to tell your friends no matter how brilliant the page was. Whats going on?
Long URLs and content management systems
Long URLs have been on the increase for a while. Some people will tell you that it is because more people are using content management systems, the ones that throw out URLs like www.sample.com/GMA/President44/story?id=6916695&page=1.
Someone somewhere decided that these are ugly and they are. However it was taken further to suggest that it was important for search engine optimization to replace such URLs with ones full of keywords. Many a person listened to this advice and plugins and add-ons addressing this abounded.
WordPress is no exception and I have been guilty on this blog of letting the full title of the post be the URL. These massive URLs break when you paste them into emails and they really are not memorable.
The truth about long URLs and SEO
Google and others went public a while ago basically laughing at the idea that long URLs full of keywords would help with search engine placement. The popularity of SEO adaptors and plugins though has meant that the number of long awkward URLs has not decreased.
Ugly URLs in fact appear all the time in the search engine, many without a single keyword in them. They do not seem to affect search engine ranking at all or at least play a minimal role in placement.
The portability so to speak of long URLs is what is most worrisome. Your visitors can spread the word about your website by emails their friends and family. To have a URL that will break when pasted into an email just defeated the purpose and no one is going to go around try to memorize a long URL to tell their friends.
What to do about long URLs?
So what I have to remind myself to do on my blog is to edit the URL before posting and make it a maximum of 3 words. And I am not the only one who gets annoyed at long URLs. John Dvorak known best from PC magazine has declared his war on long URLs.
He invited Vanessa Fox, an ex-Google employee and SEO expert, to join his panel on Cranky Geeks to discuss this among other tech news. They also mention the Facebook debacle where Facebook changed their terms of service and then changed them back again after their users revolted.
Here is what they had to say (video player needed):
Cranky Geeks on tech news and long URLs
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
You definitely have a point although I would argue that 3 words is still a little short.
Even if we both agree to set aside SEO for a moment then regardless it can still increase your click through in the organic search results if your URL matches a searchers keyword phrase and is bolded.
Of course, an increased CTR will also in turn help you rank higher as there is some indication that Google incorporates that type of user behavior into it’s ever morphing ranking for a given site.
Also, the 3 word URL can actually be more confusing than a long URL depending on the topic of the page (i.e. imagine a more specific niche that by definition needs to have at least 3 words – a site with the main topic of “South Dakota Real Estate”: you certainly don’t want to shortcut all of your URL’s to only say /south-dakota-real/ or /sd-real-estate/ when in fact you have articles on “South Dakota Commercial Real Estate” or “South Dakota Split Level Properties” that should really have their URL’s as /south-dakota-commercial-real-estate/ and /south-dakota-split-level-properties/ respectively).
Thanks,
Joel
http://www.DomainSuperstar.com
Hi Joel,
Interesting take on this. Is there actual evidence that having the URL match the search phrase and being bolded changes the CTR? To be honest, the URL never catches my eye. I read the title which is in large font and keywords bolded and the same with the description. I might check the beginning of the url to see if it is a site I know. That may just be me.
I can see going to four words in the example you gave. I could put it another way: have the shortest number of words in the URL to give the person a clue as to what the article is about. I would focus more on the title and description since I think those are what draw people in and get them to click.
I agree with you in that I would prefer people not go back to nonsense ugly URLs or confusing short URLs.
I wonder what other readers say about what motivates them to click on a search query result.
Personally, I don’t really care about the way the URL look when i click on a link. As far as the SEO part I do not know, other than the fact that I read the same statement from G saying keyword URLs doesn’t improve ranking (as I understood the statement).
The copy-paste point of URL’s is a good reaseon to keep the URL fairly short. I try to edit my Wordpress URL’s when I remember it.
Barry,
I’ve found that Long(er) URLs with blog and article posts do help with in the SE’s.
But they are only useful if you remove the common words from the slug like “a, the, with” etc and leave 2 or 3 relevant words in the slug.
For example, you have used a good slug of /seo-urls/ for this post, but you’ve likely shortened it from the wordpress default of /long-urls-good-for-seo/ – correct?
Good work at showing how to use slugs effectively.
- Richard
Right Johan. That’s what Google has stated. But as Joel pointed out, human behavior could change the expected click through rate and then Google’s statement would be right but your experience would be different because of human behavior.
Richard,
Yes, exactly. I have been lazy about shortening my URLs but did so for this post. It was brought home to me yesterday when trying to paste a very long URL from another blog and then I saw Dvorak’s piece.
Richard,
You may want to try out the “SEO Slugs” plugin (if you are using Wordpress):
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/
- Joel
http://www.DomainSuperstar.com
Google lies. Not the first time, won’t be the last time.
Go with what you know works, don’t listen to what anybody else says or doesn’t say.
Trust what you see with your own two eyes.
All the best,
Mike
PS– having the keywords within the url does help.
@Domain Superstar
Thanks for the tip, but we prefer to do it ourselves. You’ll want to pepper and customise those URLs in ways that a plugin just can’t do it.
- Richard
I agree with much of the above. We are seeing longer URLs because the shorter ones are already taken. However, it is true that short, sweet, and to the point URLs are the best. I always evaluate the length of the domain name, but it is also important if the domain name is keyword centric and speaks to a specific niche market.
Hi Doe-mainer,
I think I may have been unclear. The URLs we are referring to are the ones on posts and pages, not the domain name itself.
So for this page: //www.predictivedomaining.com/2009/02/20/seo-urls/
as opposed to something like //www.predictivedomaining.com/2009/02/20/Long-URLs-good-for-SEO/
Domain name length is a whole other story. There I agree with what you said.
I believe that the SEO optimal custom structure for title tags is “/%category%/%postname%/%tags%/” (change in ’settings-permalinks’ of Worpress). This is long, but SEs like it.
I am big fan of well-named urls and I tend to keep them to three words. In fact, I came upon this blog because I was searching for an article I once read that promoted keeping urls to two hyphens.
Hi Barry,
With a website like jobs.com do you think its better for SEO purposes with google, to name the url for a page about “mining jobs” like.
1) jobs.com/mining.html OR 2) jobs.com/mining-jobs.html ??
Second question is I have seen an SEO/website firm start to use the plus sign (+) in between keywords in the url path than the usual (-)
For example
jobs.com/mining+jobs.html
Do you know if using + is better? The only reason I can think of them using this is that if you do a search on google, their url includes the + sign in between the keyword phase you are searching for.
Rosco
Hi Rosco,
Either 1 or 2 will work. 2 may be marginally better but this is probably not a major signal for indexing and ranking. The fact that the base url and topic is about jobs is the main signal.
Logical organization is more important for the correct indexing and for visitors to navigate so plan out your urls to give a good structure now and for the future. There are more important on-page and off-page factors that you should focus on. Perhaps I will blog about some of those shortly.
Using a plus sign is not something I have tried. I can’t imagine it is any better than a hyphen. The point here is that getting too long with urls creates some problems.
Thanks for that,
Rosco