How to Fix Page URL is Longer Than 200 Characters
How to Fix Page URL is Longer Than 200 Characters In this post, we’ll discuss three different issues which are all very similar and these are:
URLs that are too long
Pages that have too many parameters in the URLs
URLs that are longer than 200 characters.
The URLs that are longer than 200 characters and the URLs that are too long are essentially the same issue.
To fix these, you basically need to have URLs with less than 200 characters. Then the other issue is that your URLs have too many parameters. I’ll show you what the parameters are in a second.
But it also creates a fairly similar issue. I think the best way to look at this is just to look at some examples.
Let’s say your URL says www.mysite.com/SEO/advice/best-practice/example-of-a-URL-that-is-too-long
So that’s too long for a number of reasons. A quick tip: You don’t need to include articles like “a” and “the”. It’s okay not to include those.
Removing these words automatically is going to shorten it a little bit. With WordPress, one of the most common ways that URLs get to be too long is that you name an article like a sentence, and then the URL is built on that sentence.
You want to think about how you can keep all your URL short but you also want them to be user-friendly so that if somebody does a search, a more readable URL is going to be displayed right above the title tag up here.
Now it’s not the most important content here in search listing results but it is there and you do want it to make sense.
Part of the goal here is to have your full URL to be able to display in this area and still make sense and seem useful to visitors.
One way to do that is just to cut down on the number of characters and 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 that I had mentioned earlier.
Parameters, in this case, would be things like SEO. That’s a bit of sub-directory advice and is another best practice. Usually, when you do most searches and then you go through the results that are listed on the first page, they’re only going to have a couple of sub-directories.
So look at Moz.com. Their URL has the name of the website, then they have the community folder, and then the name of the article.
Sometimes you see an article name that is right off what we call the root. It’s the website name and then the article name which is okay. While it’s not as SEO friendly, websites like Quora that have a huge number of questions that need to be accessed from different navigation schemes are more likely to do this.
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: Hubbledigital.com/blogs/shorter-URLs-improve… (I would say that the URL is a little too long).
So that’s what you want to do too. You want to keep two things in mind: keep your URLs as short as possible and make them user-friendly and be as descriptive as you can while keeping them short.
Now one thing to note is if you run an audit and you have this issue, you have to take into account how long your URLs have been online.
If you have a URL that’s been online, say for like five years, 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.
As you can see, these URLs are probably a little too long and yet these guys are still on the homepage.
So to be on the front page of Google, you don’t necessarily have to have all your 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 going forward, just make sure that your URL is 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.
And if you change old URLs, you’re automatically going to lose rankings right away. So with your old URLs, as long as they’re not really long and you don’t have a lot of them then your website is safe. But if it’s filled with all URLs that are too long, then you probably want to start to address that.
Also, if you’re not getting any organic traffic at all or is not ranking, 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 as is. If you’re unsure, go into Google Analytics, go into your landing pages and sort by acquisition, and check your organic traffic.
If you have no organic traffic that’s landing on those pages with long URLs, that’s an indication that maybe you want to try to improve them.
So if that’s the case then do that.
But if you have a page with a long URL and it’s getting a lot of organic traffic, I would say just leave it and don’t touch it. Anyway, that should help with these three issues.