I am currently redesigning one of my larger websites. Same content, but different layout.
After reading a few threads here lately, I was wondering what others would do in my situation regarding URLs.
For nearly all of the articles on this site, I have placed them all in one of three folders;
example.com/articles/filename.html
example.com/guides/filename2.html
example.com/other-guides/filename3.html
Now that these folders have become bigger, and I am moving from a static implementation to dynamic, the plan was to create a URL for each page within its related categories in the URL structure i.e. example.com/cat1/cat2/cat3/filename.html
I obviously expected that by changing these URLs that I would lose traffic while search engines catch-up after implementing 301 redirects – and that some of the link juice would be saturated.
I am now starting to think whether this strategy is the right one. The new URLs, although making more sense, will be a lot longer. What sort of effect could this have in CTR via search engines?
Are there clear advantages for short vs long URLs?
Any advice or thoughts welcome.
