Are Long URLs bad for SEO?
Feb 10th, 2009 by Tim Skipper
In his PC Magazine article SEO Fiascoes: The Trouble With Search Engine Optimization, John C. Dvorak postulates that long URLs are detrimental to SEO, despite what everyone else seems to be saying.
He conducts an experiment on his own 1.2 million page views per month blog by changing existing URLs to the long version, and sees an immediate drop to 900,000 page views. Dvorak sites this as proof that it doesn’t work.
I can’t help thinking that the drop is due to the search engines dropping the old URLs and re-indexing the long URLs. This takes time. Maybe if Dvorak reviews his page views in a couple of months he’ll see a different picture.
What do you think?
Hey there,
Good point. I agree with you that Google will need to re-index. This is something I am having to deal with now. In reverse though.
What is the negative impact of simple URLs on SEO. I noticed in my google webmaster console that it is picking up the same page but the long and the short versions and reporting them back as “problems”
Cheers!