John Muller of Google recently stated that URLs should be no more than 1000 characters.
This figure was mentioned in the discussion of URL lengths for better SEO in a Google Webmaster Hangout.
Although URLs rarely reach, and even more than exceed 1000 characters, this is possible. Various factors, such as parameters and subfolders, can significantly increase the length of the URL.
At what point does the length of the URL begin to affect SEO?
Well, it turns out that you probably don’t need to worry about the length of the URL until you get closer to 1000 characters.
In other words, you have plenty of space for the flight of fancy. In view of the above, Futureinapps recommends short URLs and avoiding their increase.
Web browsers can handle URLs of up to 2000 characters, which makes Google's 1000 character limit worthy of special attention.
In fairness, Muller may have thrown out an arbitrary number, but he already mentioned that number before.
Back in 2009, in response to the Google Help Forums thread, Muller stated:
"We can certainly crawl and index URLs longer than 1000 characters - but this does not mean that this is good practice :-)."
So, here it is. Hold on to short URLs, but don't worry if they get a bit longer. While they are less than 1000 characters.
Here is Muller’s full URL citation:
“These are just different URL structures that some sites have. Some sites use parameters, some sites use folders with file names. Everyone does it a little differently.
What matters to us is that we can take the URL that you have, we can crawl it, and we can index it at that URL and collect the content. How you determine which URL to use is ultimately up to you.
The only thing I would like to draw attention to is, in my opinion, not more than a thousand characters. You may have to work hard to make URLs so long. ”
Your URL must be clear to Google - this is the main requirement. So try to name the pages according to the content and then Google will index them well.
