How to handle Friendly URLs together with internal filters search?

[JoaoCJ]

I've been trying to handle URLs from a unfrendly folder format to a semantic one, the thing is by doing so I end up with a longer URL and therefore a longer Title.

Right now the format of my classified site for job seeking looks like this (folders):

site.com/search/category/sales/level/supervisor/location/seattle/company/acme/published/2-days-ago/type/full-time/q/salesman/page/2

format: Filter/Content where at the end q is the query people are writting

My suggestion is the following: Mixing Jobs with location, mixing category and level, and puting the rest of the filters at the end adding "--" between them. And adding 2 parameters, query (q) and pagination (pag)

site.com/jobs-at-seattle/sales-supervisor/company/acme/full-time--published-2-days-ago?q=salesman&pag=2

Any thoughts on how to handle URLs over 100 chararcters and titles that go over 65?, or maybe is ok to have "friendly" long URLs and long titles when it comes to classified ad sites since they are based on internal filters to help people find what they are looking for.

Sidenote: Is itok to have 2 parameters in the URL (Query and Pagination)

Thanks a lot.

[randfish]

Hi JoaoCJ - In cases like these, I don't usually sweat the URL length too much. It is OK to go over a bit -- our recommendations come from correlation analysis and testing. Observing Google's rankings, it tends to be the case that pages with fewer parameters (like 0) tend to outperform pages with more, and that shorter URLs tend to outperform longer ones. That said, it's not a hard and fast rule, more a sloping line.

As far as the filters go, I might consider using rel=canonical unless you're sure you want those pages separately indexed. If that's the case (you DO want them indexed), perhaps consider using static URLS -- even something like a number in the URL could work, e.g. /123/.  For the pagination, Google's also got the rel=prev/next tags that I'd suggest employing.

Wish you all the best!

[JoaoCJ]

Hi Rand,

I'll send the format to the IT team, and start working with the redirections.

However, my only concern I have left is titles, as more filters are used the title will eventually go over the 65 mark, but I guess is something I have to live with it.

Thanks again Rand.

[randfish]

Not too big a problem to have slightly longer title. Just be aware that how they display in SERPs can affect CTR, which can affect rankings. You can use https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool to get a good view of that.