How to Fix Pages that Have Too Many Parameters in Their URLs
How to Fix Pages that Have Too Many Parameters in Their URLs There are three different issues here, but they’re all very similar and those are, URLs that are too long, pages that have too many parameters in the URLs, and URLs that are longer than 200 characters.
So the URLs that are longer than 200 characters and the URLs that are too long, that is essentially the same issue.
I would say 200 characters, probably even on the long side. But basically, you just want to make sure your URS, your URLs are not, is not that low.
And then the other issue is, URLs have too many parameters. I’ll show you what parameters are in a second.
But it also creates a fairly similar issue. So here’s, I think the best way to look at this is just to look at some examples.
So let’s say you have a URL up at the top here. Let’s say, this is, this is your all, you have my site.com, slash SEO slash advice slash best practice slash example of a URL that is too long.
So that’s, that’s too long for, for a number of reasons. Number one, a quick tip. You don’t need to include articles like a, and the, you don’t need to include those.
So that automatically is going to shorten it a little bit, because one of the most common ways that, especially with WordPress, that URLs get to be too long, is that you name an article like a sentence, and then that sentence is just, kind of it, the, the URL is built on that sentence.
So you might have an even longer URL here. So to get these a little bit, a bit shorter, you want to think about how do you wanna think about two things really, you want to keep your all are short, but you also want them to be user-friendly so that if somebody does a search and in this case, I just did a search about long, you know, keeping URLs short, the URL is going to be displayed right above the title tag up here.
Now it’s not the most important content herein, in search listing results. But it is there and you do want it to make sense.
So this article a long domain name versus short that’s, you know, that is kind of self-explanatory. One thing that I find kind of funny is that some of these articles, so the moz usually does very, very good work.
So their URLs look good. Look at this one, sitepoint.com community are these URLs too long, I assume. And yes, they are too long cause they don’t, they don’t all display.
So part of the goal here is to have your, your full URL be able to display in this area and still make sense and seem useful to visitors.
Now, one way to do that is just to cut down on the number of characters, the words, if you can use fewer words and still have it make sense, definitely do that.
And then the other way is to reduce the number of parameters, which I had mentioned early. So parameters, in this case, would be, things like SEO.
That’s a sub-directory advice. That’s another best practice. That’s another one and usually, when you do most searches and then you go, you go through the results that are listed, on the first page.
They’re only going to have a couple, sub-directories. So look at Moz, it’s moz.com. You’re going to have the name of the website.
Then they have one folder community and then the article, most often you’re going to see that, stack overflow.com questions.
What is the maximum, sometimes you see an article name that is right off what we call the root?
So it’s the website name and then the article name that’s okay too. That’s not as SEO friendly, but websites like Cora that have a huge number of questions that need to be accessed from different, you know, different navigation schemes, are more likely to do this.
If you’re, if you have a smaller site and you can control the architecture, you’d probably want to do something more like this.
Here’s a pretty common one. Hubble digital.com blog, shorter URLs improve, and again, I would say that URL is a little, a little too long.
So that’s what you want to do too. You want to keep two things in mind, keep your, your URLs as short as possible, and make them user-friendly be as descriptive as you can.
And while keeping them short. <inaudible> Now one thing to note, if you have, if you run, an audit and you have this issue, you have to take into account.
How long have your URLs been online? If you have a URL that’s been online, say for like five years or 10 years, or some long amount of time, measured by multiple years, there is some advantage to just leaving it as is, this is not a huge issue.
If your URL is a little long, as you can see, these URLs are probably a little too long and these guys are still on the homepage.
So on the front page of Google rather, so it’s not something that you absolutely have to have all your URL URLs as short as possible.
If you have a URL that’s been there for any length of time, I would probably leave it as is, and moving forward, just make sure that your URL is dry.
Try to keep them as short as possible, because if you go back and you want to change your old URLs, you’re going to have to take an additional step of creating redirects.
Because if you change that URL, you’re, you’re automatically going to lose rankings right away. So that’s, so it’s kind of walking line herewith, with a few different issues.
Number one, you certainly don’t lose or anything. So old URLs, as long as they’re not really, really long and I would say as long as you don’t have a lot of them. So if your website is, safe, filled with it’s all URLs that are too long, then you probably want to start to address that.
Also, if you have no rankings, if you’re not getting any organic traffic at all, then this could be something you could look at.
But if you’re already getting some organic traffic, maybe you have good rankings and you have some URLs that are a little too long.
You might want to leave them. If you’re unsure, go into Google Analytics, go into your, landing pages and sort by acquisition, and see, look at your organic traffic.
If you have no organic traffic, that’s landing on those pages with long URLs, that’s an indication maybe you want to try to improve them.
And in that case, do that, if you have a page with a long URL and it’s getting a lot of organic traffic, I would say, just leave it, don’t touch it.
Anyway, that should help with these Three issues.