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    Url too long

    On-Page / Site Optimization
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    • KellyDSD86
      KellyDSD86 last edited by

      Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture

      Our domain name does not have office furniture in it.

      So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat

      to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category

      However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls

      I am wondering whether we should change back :

      For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks

      Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks

      Or am I going to confuse matters even more?

      I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product

      I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • GastonRiera
        GastonRiera last edited by

        Hi there!

        There is nothing to worry about URL length. It was said by John Mueller that: SHORTER URLS AREN'T GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN SEARCH - Deepcrawl Webmasters Hangouts notes 07/13/18

        That said, I'd suggest you stick with the current URL structure. Think as Google likes coherence, so having a well-designed architecture in your information serves well to Google, although Google Search Algorithms can understand both structures.
        Yeap, don't change too much your structure, like 301 redirects cause Google to spend more time and you could be having redirect chains that if goes higher than 5 hops Google bot will stop crawling them.

        If you still mind about long URLs, think on how some subfolders names can be shrunk and avoid repeating words. Look at the example you gave us: domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks
         2x office, 2x corner, 2x desks, it could probably be like domain.com/office-furniture/corner-desks/beech

        Hope it helps.
        Best luck
        GR

        HashtagHustler 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • HashtagHustler
          HashtagHustler @GastonRiera last edited by

          I agree with Gaston 100%... not only that but changing your URL is not only a major pain in the butt, if not done properly can severely hurt your SEO.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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