Should there be a limit to url lengths?

miked · Oct 10, 2011

Hey all,

Constructing a new site, and I'm facing an issue regarding url length. The site is one giving information on resources with precise technical descriptions that can be >100 characters. It'd be desirable (or would it?) to have the technical description in the URL, but could there be a problem with having URLs of such a length? Apart from being pretty un-user friendly.

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

Mike.

dta · Oct 10, 2011

long urls can often help with seo.

obviously not user friendly though, so question to ask yourself is whether you'd expect a user to have to remember such a url or are they simply linkages between your site and a user will just click a link to follow it and not really care how long the underlying url is.

if you need both you could always add a short url version in the .htaccess file that redirects to the longer one

miked · Oct 10, 2011

Ah! Thanks for the help. Think I'll go with the longer ones, as I suspect people will bookmark rather than try to remember.

Cheers,
Mike.

djbw · Oct 10, 2011

Is there no commonly used acronym or abbreviation that you can use instead?
Long URLs just look clumsy to me; I try to stick to two or three words if I can.

miked · Oct 10, 2011

Unfortunately not. The terms I need to use are official classifications: some are pithy enough, but some are quite lengthy... but can't really be cut as that would lose some of the meaning. Strange one, really. The navigation menu's going to look interesting!

djbw · Oct 10, 2011

Do you need the EMD then? I know it's nice for the SEO benefits but for example ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com is an amusing name but I can never remember it so always end up googling.
I don't really know what else to suggest!

daleduan · Oct 11, 2011

What you can do is have the long URL then find a brandable domain that would be easy to remember and will create a brand for you. Then make a 301 redirect to that brandable domain. In that way, you will be making your SEO on the long EM-Domain then creating a brand on the short domain.