Are long URLs bad for SEO?

[Blind_Foundation]

Hi,

I would like to know how bad is the long URLs that I have on my website.

At the moment we have 543 long urls and I was wondering how big is the impact in my SEO.

Thank you

[NickW816]

Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-

When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.

Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".

In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!

[VickyXM]

Good question, I have about 300 pages with long URL, but I wonder, what is better here, to have long URLs or a lot of 301 redirects? Which option will make less harm?

Thanks

[brodywebdesign]

I am about 100% sure that had to with applying your keyword into the URL.  I still haven't really been able to find any concrete information on how having to long of a keyword effects rankings. I currently have a customer who decided to put all these dimensions into his product URL's making them way to long. I just want to know if it's worth the work to go in and shorten all of those and remove the dimensions.

[JessyHuang008]

thanks you for information

[Kelly-Anne]

After 512 pixels, Google will truncate your URL in search results pages. A good rule of thumb is to keep your URLs as short as you can, without losing their general meaning.