Long or Short URLs. Who's Coming to Dinner?

[creativedepartment]

This has been discussed on the forums in some regard.

My situation.

Example 1 Long Keyword URL:

www.abctown.com/keyword-for-life-helping-keywords-everywhere-rank-better

Example 2 Short Keyword URL:

www.abctown.com/keyword

In both examples I want to improve rankings for the "keyword" phrase. My current URL is example 1. And I've landed a page one ranking in Google (7) with that URL. In attempts to improve rankings further (top 5), I was toying with the idea of going simpler with all my URLs in favor of the example 2 model.

Might this method help or hurt my current rankings? In recent articles I've read it seems that going with the simpler more human approach to my SEO efforts.

Any thought would be appreciated.

Cheers,

[Getz.pro]

I would vote for middle ground here on future pages, and questions on current page metrics.

www.abctown.com/keyword-for-life

And then lengthen the Title to the full title of the page.

Does the current page have many inbound links? If so, doing a 301 will loos some of that juice. Can you get the inbound links re-pointed? If so, then 301 the page and get the old links to point to the new page.

If not, and this page has a high authority, then you will take a hit on the move, at least for the short term. But building more inbound links to the new page will resolve this.

Also, if you do move the page, I would push it back out on your social network to get the SEs attention and build fresh links back to the new page. Dr. Pete recently wrote about how the canonical tag is respected by Facebook and Twitter, so they might then respect the 301 also.

In short, I would make the change as the shorter URL would be better in my opinion.

[MarieHaynes]

I'd love to see if someone has tests to this effect.  I have silly long urls (mostly because I designed them before I knew anything about SEO.)  But, I kind of feel that they help me.

My philosophy is that if I am targeting long tail traffic then having a url like, mydomain.com/questions-about-blue-widgets-and-where-to-purchase-them is good.  But, if I have an article that I want at the top of the serps for a particular competetive term then I would go for something like mydomain.com/blue-widgets.

I've heard people say that BING likes shorter urls...not sure if it is true though.

[evolvingSEO]

This answer comes right from Rand himself (and a few other answers), as I just stumbled upon it in Quora yesterday:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-permalink-structure-for-SEO

And to add my two cents, as far as rankings, I don't think you can credit the URL alone for a #1 page ranking. I would construct your URL as Rand suggests and focus your on-page optimization efforts in a holistic manner.

[Thos003]

Test, test, test.

It seems that the general rule of thumb on old URLs redirecting to new ones is that you will lose some of the linking value in the redirect.

But I must agree with Richard Getz, in that you may want a middle ground. You certainly shouldn't over kill KWs in the URL and I would advise never using the Keyword twice the way you have in Example 1.

[EGOL]

I try to make the URL match the most important keyword that I hope to rank for.

[creativedepartment]

Thanks for the input! Great advise.

In the above examples, if I decided to move to a shorter, simpler URL for page abctown.com/keyword-for-life-helping-keywords-everywhere-rank-better to abctown.com/keyword

Would you setup the 301 from the current page URL to the simpler one or the new simple URL to the current URL???

Appreciate the help!

[Getz.pro]

Yes, as I mentioned above, in order to keep page authority (at least most of it) and ranking, you will want to 301 the page.

[EGOL]

If this was on my site I would not change the URL.

You might gain a little from having a better URL but you might lose a little by doing a redirect.  Maybe you would lose more from the redirect than you gain from the short URL.

So, I would start using better URLs going forward and spend the time savings on new content.

[Thos003]

Agreed. The risk of losing juice from a redirect would keep me from moving forward. The only way that I would consider redirecting the old page is if the new page provides better and more relevant/current content.

If you don't plan on improving the content and are only using duplicate content then there is no need to change the page or URL.