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So in July (2019) John Mu from Google stated that URLs are generally ok up to 1,000 characters: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-john-mueller-recommends-keeping-urls-under-1000-characters/318739/ Google 'can' crawl and index URLs over 1,000 characters long (up to about 2k characters) but best practice seems to be up to 1,000 characters Due to this, I personally don't agree with Moz's evaluation of, when a URL is getting too long. Your example URL, is nowhere close to 1,000 characters long. Where Moz and Google disagree I tend to side with Google info That being said, your URL has redundant layers. Why even have "/category/" in the URL? Just go like this: mysite.com/downloads/premium-downloads/sub-category/ People aren't so stupid that they need a fake URL layer called "/category/", to know that the following URL layer 'is' a category. IMO that's redundant architecture which is getting in your way for no reason If you don't perform your redirects properly and you change the architecture of the site, you absolutely could see a negative impact on your rankings. Unless you're confident in terms of crawling your whole site, performing very granular redirects with high accuracy and missing nothing - I'd just leave it as it is