URL length does it really make a difference

[copykatrecipes]

I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects.  Should I edit old material?  My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.

[scanlin]

url length per se, no, but URI structure, yes. You should not have your site designed 10 layers deep, for example. There's a discussion of it here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm  and I like this example they give:

/readme.php?source=direct&page=34&articletype=widgetingforests&loc=uk

should rank better than:

/readme-source-direct-page-34-articletype-widgetingforests-loc-uk.html

or

/readme/source/direct/page-34/articletype/widgetingforests/loc-uk/

[StalkerB]

No.

It's what you do with it that counts! Way-hey!

[craven22]

Hi Stephanie,

If you do end up re-writing your URLs there is a very useful plugin here;

http://www.techzene.com/wordpress-tips/change-url-structure-wordpress/

It'll make sure your site doesn't produce thousands of 404 errors when people are finding your site via old backlinks/google

[KeriMorgret]

Mike, I'm getting a 404 when I try to visit that page and find out the context of the example. Their example doesn't make much sense, as having subfolders like "direct" really aren't telling you if the traffic is direct.

I agree that it is better to not have a site 10 layers deep, but it's also beneficial to not have 20 parameters on a URL.

However, considering the OP is on Wordpress, I imagine we're talking about the post structure where you have the date as part of the URL. If the site in question is the recipe site from your profile, the following URL doesn't seem too horribly bad.

http://www.copykat.com/2009/02/07/cheddar-chicken-spaghetti/

However, if you're redesigning anyway and want a cleaner URL, you may want to consider a structure that does not include the date. The date really doesn't hold a lot of meaning in this case. I honestly don't care if your spaghetti recipe is two weeks old or five years old when I'm looking for a recipe. I use the Redirection plugin on my Wordpress site, and that plugin has been updated a bit more recently than the other plugin listed so might work a little better with the newer versions. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Would love to see other comments and opinions.

[scanlin]

I don't know what happened to the url. Sorry about that. Try copying this and pasting it into a browser window:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm