Google: URL Length Is Not A Ranking Factor

Google‘s John Mueller had to say on Twitter that “URL length is not a ranking fraction.” He was told that a CMS autogenerates URLs that are often longer than what is recommended for SEO. Now, what is recommended for SEO in terms of length?

Maybe for usability, keeping your URLs short and sweet is a good thing. But Google can crawl and process pretty long URLs.

Here is John’s tweet:

URL length is not a ranking fraction.

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) February 5, 2020

I mean, Google can handle a URLs as long as 2,000 characters or so. Now while Google prefers to show the shorter version of the URL, if available, it doesn’t mean Google cannot index and rank longer URLs. Meaning, if your URL says .com/google-url-length-seo.html?tons-of-parameters-goes-here, Google will likely canonicalize it to .com/google-url-length-seo.html and remove the added on parameters.

Forum discussion at Twitter.