You must have heard that Google prefers short URLs over long URLs. Are you still confused that whether it is true or just an SEO myth? Well! You will get your answers here in this blog. You will be having a detailed overview of what a URL is and whether URL length has any role in SEO ranking or not.
Let’s just start with the basics.
What is an URL?
A URL is an acronym used for Uniform Resource Locator. It is a page address that indicates its location on the Internet. This link shows up in the address bar of the browser. The standard URL structure contains:
- domain name;
- data transfer protocol e.g. https://;
- may contain special anchors and parameters, for example, the GET method which is used to get the contents of a resource.
- the path from the domain name to the page, which includes a chain of subdirectories and directories;
The domain name is the main part of the URL. Other components may have different contents and may vary in length. The result depends on the name of the page to which it leads and the names of the directories.
The URL syntax allows numbers, letters, and extra characters.
Does URL affect SEO?
Now comes the question: does URL matter for SEO? The answer is no. The URL length doesn’t matter. These are only used as identifiers. However, URL length can affect the appearance of search snippets but it does not have any impact on ranking. If you keep the length shorter it just makes monitoring easier.
So, to conclude, neither number of slashes nor the SEO URL length has any effect on ranking.
Role of URL length in Canonicalization
Canonicalization is the only aspect of the system where URL Length matters. When there are multiple copies of a page on a website and the system has to pick one URL to use for indexing it tends to pick the one with a clearer and shorter URL.
Max length of URL query string
Uniform Resource Identifier — URI and Hypertext Transfer Protocol state that there is no limit to the length of a query but BigIP has limited the length of the query string to a max value, of 1354. Therefore, if the query string exceeds 1354 it won’t work.
URL length limit for browser and contextual advertising
Browsers’ URL length limits
URL max length in the address bar is about 2048 characters. However, if the browser successfully processes extra-long links it doesn’t mean that the search robot will be able to process them too. However, the appropriate page URL character limit is 75 characters.
For indexing documents with long URLs ranging from 75-120 characters, you need to index them quite well.
Contextual advertising’ URL character limit
You must consider the allowed size of the URL character limit while creating advertisements in the search network. As far as, the site links character limit of google ads is concerned it differs between 12-25 characters. For most languages, it is 25 characters and for double-width languages, it is 12 characters.
However, the HTML max length allowed in the input is 524,288 characters.
Conclusion
So, to sum up, the length of the URL does not have any proven impact on ranking. Therefore, instead of worrying about how long can a URL be, the smart approach is to customize your URL structure in a way that works for you and that you can use long term. One of the biggest mistakes that some sites do is they shorten their URLs, thinking it will affect rankings, thus, flattening the overall layout and structure.
You can surely optimize your URLs to help get your sites ranked. For this, you can consider hiring SEO Services Agency that offers phenomenal Digital Marketing Services to make the URL optimization process easier for yourself. As far as the offshoring advantages and disadvantages are concerned it has more pros than cons. Offshoring can help your business in multiple ways. It can decrease labor costs, make sure you can access skilled labor and they are available 24/7 availability. Moreover, it can also help you in reaching new markets.
Some of the downsides of Offshoring include language barriers, cultural differences, and problems in Quality control.
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Last Modified: July 1, 2024 at 4:26 am
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