It’s not uncommon to hear SEOs stating that shorter URLs are better for SEO.
Often, you’ll hear that Google prefers shorter URLs.
As such, many SEOs shorten the URLs of their webpages.
But is this actually correct?
Technically, Google has stated they prefer “Simple URLs” not necessarily shorter.
“Simple URLs” would consist of real words, are descriptive, and are relevant to the page’s content.
For example:
https://somewebsite.com/category/article-topic
According to Google, this makes for “easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content”.
The opposite of this would be “extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words”.
For example:
https://somewebsite.com/folder1/22447478/x2/14032015
In a video hangout, in response to a question about URL length and SEO, Google’s John Mueller said the following:
“These are just different URL structures that some sites have. Some sites use parameters, some sites use folders with file names.
Everyone does it slightly differently.
The important part for us is that we can take that one URL that you have, we can crawl it, and we can index it with that URL and pick up the content.
How you determine which URL to use is ultimately up to you.
The only thing I would watch out for is it should be, I think, less than a thousand characters – which you probably have to work pretty hard to make URLs that long.”
In other words, URL length doesn’t seem to be a ranking factor.
However, obscenely long URLs in excess of 1000 characters should be avoided.
This question was then asked again 2 years later, where John Mueller repeated the same answer:
“The direct answer is no. The URL length doesn’t matter.
We use URLs as identifiers. It doesn’t matter how long they are.
Personally, I try to keep them shorter than 1000 characters, but that’s just to make monitoring easier. The number of slashes in there also doesn’t matter.”
Shorter URLs Can Be Better for Canonicalization
In the same video, Google’s John Mueller stated a case where shorter URLs can play a factor in ranking:
“I’m currently only aware of one part of our systems where the URL length plays a role: that part is canonicalization.
Canonicalization is what happens when we find multiple copies of a page on your website and we have to pick one URL to use for indexing.
If we find a shorter and clearer URL, our systems tend to select that one.”
When multiple pages on your site have the same page content, Google prefers to only index one version in their search results rather than all of them.
This is to avoid redundant, duplicate content.
In this case, Google can assign more weight to the page with the shorter URL, choosing it as the canonical page–the page to crawl more often and index over the other copies in their search results.
Besides URL length for canonicalization SEO, other factors can determine how Google chooses the canonical page, such as:
- Presence of the URL in your sitemap
- If the page is served via HTTP or HTTPS
- If there is any rel=canonical labeling
Conclusion
According to Google, it doesn’t really prefer shorter URLs when it comes to ranking in their search results.
However, it does prefer URLs that are simple, descriptive, and made up of real words.
So, you should avoid creating URLs that are excessively long, cryptic, and/or contain few real words.
Ultimately, your URLs should be easy for humans (and robots) to understand what your webpage will be about, simply from the URL itself.
Hopefully, this has helped you to better understand how Google sees shorter URLs when it comes to SEO.