Were our URLs setup correctly?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

The person who build our site setup a lot of the pages like: domain/location/city/title tag For example: http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/

I know the length is too long and it seems entirely unnecessary to me. Many of the pages I have created since I got here are just domain/title tag (which is almost always city-field of law-attorneys-lawyers). However, when I compare the original pages with the new ones, they both rank similarly. Given what a pain it is to change urls, I'm not sure if it would be worth it to shorten them all or not. However, I would like to know if the way there were setup originally makes sense for some reason I don't understand.

Thanks,

Ruben

[BradyDCallahan]

Ruben,

I'd agree with your assessment that those URL formats are too long and unnecessary. This URL structure looks a lot like keyword stuffing and EMD (exact-match domain) as well as PMD (partial-match domain) were valued by the people who made the website. In their defense, depending on how old the website is, those extra keywords may have actually helped the pages rank better for relevant queries years ago.

I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting those URLs or changing them today, however. I suppose you could but today search engines are far more sophisticated. I don't think it'd be a great investment of your time.

[MoosaHemani]

You are right! The URLs are too long and unnecessary!

The shorten URL would make more sense to users as well as search engines. The current version seems like you are trying to stuffed the keywords within the URL where as shorting them will kill this factor and it will look more natural to SEs as well as end user.

My advice would be to go with shortening them and make it look real as stuffing is something Google don’t like so you might get hurt in the longer run!

Hope this helps!

[MiriamEllis]

Just popping in to add my voice to the choir. I agree with the consensus here that the URLs are too long. You are smart to be concerned about overoptimization, and I think it would be worth the effort to create new URLs and redirect the old ones.

[GaryVictory]

Hi Ruben

Key word stuffing is a big no no well documented by Google. It would be a wise decision to first shorten the link and to make sure the link is relevant to your page (just be natural). If you are registered on google places, your registered address will get picked up in the Tampa area.

go from this http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/

to this

http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury-legal-attorneys/

If you have had this long link appearing for a while - no love from Google and i would strongly advise your change this.

Hope this helps?

Gary

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks everyone! I think I'll go ahead and try to make the change for at least some of the urls that aren't performing well to see if shortening them helps. I'll report back what I find.

Thanks again!

Ruben