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And the page that says that the most commonly indexed page has 21 characters in the URL.
So I have a question: does anyone know why this is? In other words, is it
1. Google automatically penalizes pages with long URLs and lots of slashes and this is just part of the Google algorithm
2. There are lots of small sites on the web with only a few pages, so there are simply more pages at or near the top of the directory structure.
3. long URLs with lots of slashes tend to be several clicks from root so that pages are being penalized because it takes more clicks to get from the access point to these pages with long URLs?
My question boils down to this: assuming that I change nothing about the look of a site and leave the logical structure of the site exactly the same for the user, but my lead-off link on my front page changes from
www.site.com/category1/subcategory1/page1.html
I change to
www.site.com/page1.html
Will Google (or any other search engines) care?
Tom
This data is more a reflection of how long urls are on the net as a whole, than what Google supports. It may be of value to try to shoot for that 15-25 character length url.
I agree with that first sentence from url_length.htm, but the conclusion in the second comes out of nowhere if you accept the first. I suppose you can't criticise it too much, thanks to the inclusion of the phrase "may be," but the point is that there's no evidence to support it. The sentence might just as well have said, based on the evidence presented, "it may be of no value..."
Same thing, really, for the other article. That, for example, 12% of url's in Google have three slashes while 5% have four doesn't imply at all that any given url with three is more likely to be listed.
Sometimes having too many statistics breeds nothing but too many conclusions.
www.domain.tld
www.domain.tld/category/
One is the front page and one is one click away. Both have links to
www.domain.tld/category/topic/topic_page1.html
This page is also one click from the front page and one click away from the category page.
The root page and the category page no keywords directly related to the topic page except the words in the link itself. The topic page typically has lots of keywords related to the subject (both meta, in text and links), but it's usually the category page that shows up.
So I'm trying to figure out whether that's because of long URLs.
Tom
I doubt URL length has anything to do with it.
The topic page typically has lots of keywords related to the subject (both meta, in text and links), but it's usually the category page that shows up.So I'm trying to figure out whether that's because of long URLs.
It could be because of almost anything.
To start with, you have to compare the PageRank of the two pages and be sure that's not the reason. And then you have to know every other element of Google's algorithm and figure out how they're influencing the results. Does "lots of keywords," for example, mean too many? Are any of the backward links to the page that ranks higher thematically better than those to the other page? How many words are contained in each page's text content? And on and on...
I don't believe that the length of the url plays a big role either in whether a page is indexed, or in how it ranks. And there are plenty of both on- and off-page elements that certainly do play a big role; it's probably worth concentrating on them.
[edited by: JayC at 11:06 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2002]
Crawling cycle is almost at an end but you can just squeeze one last URL in, which one do you choose?
hello.com
hello-hello.com
hello-hello-hello.com/whatsgoing/onhere/then.htm
Part 2.
Ranking time is here, it's a tie for first place, what is you 1,2 and 3?
apples.com
buy-apples-online-discount-free-best-cheap.com
apples--online.com
which one do you choose?
If I were the search engine, it would depend on many things... and one of them probably wouldn't be the length of the URL. So, I can't answer the question without seeing the pages your hypothetical URLs would point to!
The point is you *don't* need to see the pages to make a judgement.
Let's ask someone with a search engine, what do you say Larry?
1. Location Metric. The IL(P) importance of page P is a function of its location, not of its contents. If URL u leads to P, then IL(P) is a function of u. For example, URLs ending with ".com" may be deemed more useful than URLs with other endings, or URL containing the string "home" may be more of interest than other URLs. Another location metric that is sometimes used considers URLs with fewer slashes more useful than those with more slashes. All these examples are local metrics since they can be evaluated simply by looking at the URL u.
[www-db.stanford.edu...]
So what about Part 2 of your question, at ranking time? Larry have anything to say about that tie-breaking strategy?
Anyway, thanks!
Tom
