URL Rewriting

Length of urls

[miara]

Hi guys!
My has just decided to implement url rewriting and I was wondering if there is a limit regarding the length of the url.
All the results I have found in google are between 70 and 90 caracters.
Should we limit our url to that? Do you think that long url wont't be crawled?
Thanks for your answer.
Mia

[troels nybo nielsen]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Miara

It's definitely a large advantage to keep your URL's as short and uncomplicated as possible. It's not only that URL's above a certain length may not be read on any websites. There also is the problem that if you do not have a very high PR, then googlebot may use stricter rules upon you for what it will read and how deep it will go into your website.

[miara]

ok, thanks for your answer I have to find a good balance with the use of keywords in my url and its length.

[troels nybo nielsen]

> keywords

AFAIK it's almost impossible to optimize a page for more than two or perhaps three keywords unless you go for a complete phrase. For optimization's sake there is really no good reason for having a lot of keywords in a URL. Unless perhaps you have structures like www.keyword1.com/keyword2/keyword3/keyword4/....

[stuntdubl]

Can someone point me in the direction in how to rewrite php pages through apache so that I can make them shorter?

[WibbleWobble]

I'd assume that short of re-writing the PHP backend or whatever, its a similar case of using mod_rewrite [searchengineworld.com] to truncate certain queries and shuffle things about. I say assume, because I've not worked in PHP enough [indeed, at all] to know whether there's a better way.

[Amras]

Hi Guys- I'm a newbie here, not even a webmaster but a site owner trying to learn. Our site has been up 2 months and currently has a page rank of 5. We offer 500 or so products in about 6 major categories. The url for the homepage and category page are short and sweet: [domainname.com...] The url for the Jewelry section (next click)gets quite long:http://www.domainname.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=FN&Category_Code=J
Does all this info have to be there using MIVA. Does it hurt the chances of googlebots capturing it? Thanks

[chameleon]

I've been tempted to go the "URL Rewrite" route as well, but I've been concerned. For example, if a URL goes from:

[somesite.com...]

To:

[somesite.com...]

Don't most search engines rank sub-directories on a domain with a lower priority than pages found in the root directory? I realize that just getting a ranking is better than nothing, but it seems that these pages would be deemed less important than the mypage.asp file itself.

I've seen some sites that do something like this:

[somesite.com...]

That seems like it would rank better. Does anyone know of a company that sells such an ISAPI filter for IIS?

[DerekT]

You may want to read this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I have urls that are very long and get crawled

example :

www.site.com/p2-cat997-si-page10-sort2-per12-pass-user-type.html

[atadams]

http://www.domainname.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=FN&Category_Code=J

Just to stress: keep the URL variables to 2 or fewer. The URL you posted has 3 and there is a very good chance that it won't be crawled.

If you are concerned about the length of the URL, you could shorten the names of the URL variables. You could change your code so that "Screen" = "s", "Store_Code" = "sc", and "Category_Code" = "cc".

That would turn:

http://www.domainname.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=FN&Category_Code=J

into:

http://www.domainname.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?s=CTGY&sc=FN&cc=J

I've also started using popular keywords as variable names so that I have those keywords in the URL. But I don't know how much that helps.

[hakre]

the http spec does not limit the length of an url. but that's only a theoretical value of length. some people tested apache on it and the reported 8k is the limit. the internet explorer has a limit at around 2k (2083 chars) for an url.

i somewhere read about 1024 or 2048 chars as spec, but can't verify in my bookshelf yet.