URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect

[russell_ms]

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?

[KevinBudzynski]

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!

[Seenlyst]

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

[Corbec888]

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!