Spammy? Long URLs

[holdtheonion]

Hi All:

Is it true that URLs such as this following one are viewed as "spammy" (besides being too long) and that such URLs will negatively affect ranks for keywords and page ranks:

http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-parts-ipod-touch-replacement-repair-parts-ipod-touch-1st-gen-replacement-repair-parts.html

My thinking is that the page will perform better once it is 301 redirected to a shorter page name, such as:

http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-touch-1G-replacement-parts.html

It also appears that these long URLs are also more likely to break, creating unnecessary 404s.

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Thanks for your insight on this issue!

[RyanKent]

The first URL you shared definitely appears spammy. A URL is not the place to stuff keywords. A short, accurate description as you shared in the second example is helpful.

A properly presented URL is a minor ranking factor. It can affect your search result position, but it is unlikely to make a difference in most cases. It affects Click Through Rates much more. In search results and other places users have very little information upon which to base a decision. Many users simply wont select a spammy URL.

As you shared, a spammy URL is much harder to remember. No user could reasonably remember your first URL. Your second URL is short enough where some people could remember it, especially if they were regular visitors on your site.

A last note, remove the technology extension of your URL. It is not helpful not users nor search engines to know it is an html page. Take a look at the URL of this Q&A page. It is a great example: www.seomoz.org/q/spammy-long-urls. There is no .html nor .php type of extension tacked onto the end. Just a short, clean and memorable URL.

[RobertFisher]

Hello Phillip,

I found it convenient your question appeared after the WBF by Cyrus on the 29th regarding title tag length.

If you look at the transcript about half way down, the header is: "Best Practices are Guidelines not Rules." I think you are talking of a best practice and not a hard and fast rule. By going to about 15 of your pages none of the other urls are that longIf you look at your url here and the url for Cyrus' WBF, yours is roughly 20 to 25 characters longer. Given his is over 80 characters, I don't see yours as being significantly different.

If you go to Google WM blog it speaks to not having session ID's and using a 301 to redirect to a clean url. Given that you do not have hundreds of urls that appear to be built for a search engine, I do not believe it becomes an issue to Google.

With the 301 you have a better url and, beyond the occasional 404 from the lengthy url, you have a customer friendly url which is what the customers like. If you make it easy to get around and to find what they are looking for, they are more apt to buy in my opinion.

Best of luck.

[holdtheonion]

Thanks Ryan for your helpful insight and confirmation of my suspicions!

These URLs were created before I came into the project.

The .html extension is automatically added by the Yahoo Store page builder, so I'm not sure I can change that.

Cheers

Phil

[AlanBleiweiss]

The issue is the repetition of words more than anything.  There's no justification or rationalization that can be used to say "this long URL is valid from a readability or a page topical focus perspective.  In fact, it can both make the site look untrustworthy to some users, and potentially cause search engines to flag the page as "over" optimized - going too far with keyword repetition is definitely something that can cause a page to lose some of it's ranking value.