At Google, 'Long URLs' Can Land Your Website in Trouble!

June 25th, 2008 | RSS Feed

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It's true! According to Search Engine Roundtable now even modeling your websites on long URLs can get your sites into trouble with Google indexing.

Over at the Google Groups, Googler JohnMu comments upon a URL that according to him is quite long and this is what he has to say,

“Looking at the pages indexed, I see two issues which Autocrat has already mentioned (thanks, Autocrat!) that I'd like to expand on:

1. Long & crazy URLs
I ran into this URL while looking at [site:gadgetguy.com.au] :

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-c…

Now I'm all for having descriptive URLs, but …. this seems to be taking it a bit too far and I have a bit of trouble identifying anything that matches in the content of your page.

The problem with URLs like this is that they almost appear to be random and in fact I can get exactly the same page by using something like: http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/xyzzy-42.html . In general, you should make sure that you have only one URL that leads to your content
– all others should either redirect to the proper URL or return HTTP result code 404 to signal that the URL is invalid. Without that, your site is leading us (and all other crawlers) on a wild goose chase.

If your CMS is not able to handle this properly (one URL per piece of content), I would recommend not using rewritten URLs so that we can recognize and skip over unimportant parameters in your URL query string.”

This may seem to be an overkill, but, better to work the way Google advises you, rather than running around with a 'reconsideration request'.

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Comments

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48055 Responses2008-06-26+05%3A50%3A21Navneet+Kaushal to “At Google, 'Long URLs' Can Land Your Website in Trouble!”

Janeth Says:
June 26th, 2008 at 08:37
It is not true. The url in question was a long spam url that repeated keywords and went to a page that had different content on it.

And Google said it might cause some red flags if I remember correctly.
digital underground Says:
June 26th, 2008 at 16:07
keyword spamming very bad.
Bendz Says:
June 27th, 2008 at 01:35
Hi,

Useful for us.
Nice post.

http://cosmichealing.blogspot.com
baloch Says:
June 28th, 2008 at 10:52
thanks for the heads up. I am a blogger as well and when starting out used those but switched to the numbered version. with such long names it is sometimes hard to bookmark as well and for direct lookups
Rent or Hire Says:
July 1st, 2008 at 01:01
Good post, but as Janeth says. It's directing to a different page. I didn't see it as too spammy…

Now, my site..
http://www.rentorhire.com.au

Uses quite long url's in some instances, and that is dependant on what users enter as their titles (we do have a character limit)…

We can generate url's like (for categories)… http://www.rentorhire.com.au/rent-hire/Amusement-Equipment/Carnival-Rides-Games/

and then URL's for individual items like…
http://www.rentorhire.com.au/Play-Parachute-various-sizes-Alexandra-Hills-Brisbane-Region-QLD-15257.html

What is your thoughts on this?
We include item name + surburb + state…