Forum Moderators: open
www.mydomain.com/widgets/this-is-the-very-long-title-that-contains-about-10-words
would something like that considered spam by search engines?
[edited by: caveman at 8:07 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS [/edit]
Are very long urls considered spam?
imagined, you should take care to differentiate between the components of a URI. Your question as posed really relates to the filename, not the entire URI:
www.mydomain.com/widgets/this-is-the-very-long-title-that-contains-about-10-words
Matt Cutts is chief spam fighter at Google. Here is an example URI from a recent post he made on his blog.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-delete-files-from-a-directory-i-own-in-freebsd/
There is nothing wrong with long, hyphenated filenames: They telegraph what a page is likely to be about, which most users and all the major SE's find quite useful.
Domain names and directory names are a different matter.
;-)
At the end of the day you need to look at what is ranking high and see what they are doing for the keywords that you want to target. If the top 30 sites have short urls and you dont see anything with long urls for a certain keyword than it can mean something.
Technically google has no problem crawling long urls.
Keep in mind that if you DO spam in your URL by keyword stuffing than it will be considered spam don't do this.
mydomain.com/keyword-same-keyword-same-keyword-same-keyword
:)
there is a difference between very long urls on Blogs and very long urls on static sites
Yep, one is a blog and one isn't. In terms of ranking though, doesn't really matter. This is why we test things; so we know, and don't have to guess. ;-)
At the end of the day you need to look at what is ranking high and see what they are doing for the keywords that you want to target. If the top 30 sites have short urls and you dont see anything with long urls for a certain keyword than it can mean something.
Agree, it's very good practice to look at the top ranking sites to see what they do. We do it all the time. But one must be very careful not to draw false conclusions. If all one ever does is replicate what others do, that becomes self-limiting. It's not a leadership approach.
In the context of this thread, it's a false conclusion to look at a few SERP's and conclude long filenames are a possible problem. They are not, and there is abundant proof out there for the finding. As previously noted though, that is different to hyphenated domains and directory naming.
don't do this.mydomain.com/keyword-same-keyword-same-keyword-same-keyword
Excellent point to add. Some might have assumed otherwise.
for instance they want the full product name in the url like
www.annoyinglylongwebsite.com/productcategory_.com/
and also putting massive amounts of words in alt tags.
I'm not sure if these things are good or bad.
So long as it's clear that the idea is theirs, and the decisions was not yours, I'd not worry too much; in my experience, people with ideas like that won't listen, so no sense getting in a row about it.
