Can thread URL's be "too long"?

[Island]

What is the thinking on the maximum length of thread URL's? Can long thread titles with vBSEO including the title in the thread URL create URL's that are too long and seem spammy to search engines?

[Joe Ward]

Hi Jeff,

If you are concerned with URL length, please check out our "Limit URL Length" feature found in the vBSEO control panel (vbseocp.php) in the following section:

URL Rewrite Settings -> General Options -> Limit URL Length

[BamaStangGuy]

I think as long as you remove words like "the" "a" "an" etc etc you will be ok.

[Island]

Yes, I see the feature... just not sure if I should use it or not. Any thoughts on whether URLs can grow too long have any disadvantages in terms of SEO or any search engines that might frown on "too long" URLs?

[Island]

Thanks Bama -- sorry posted just as you were posting.

Just wan't sure if URL's like
http://www.colorprintingforum.com/me...-print-13.html
were "excessively" long. Obviously "cost per print" is an important part of that though, so I hate to truncate it... unless there is a disadvantage to long URL's. I fear cutting them would make the URL's make less sense in some cases. (for example it would look odd if a URL were truncated after vs. or per)

[Joe Ward]

I do not believe that they would result in penalties since many mainstream sites feature long URLs and the official standard allows for many characters to be included.

However, I would make the decision on a case by case basis.

If your forum has long forum names, and a tendency to have very long thread titles, then I would probably avoid using both the forum and thread title in your CRUs, for reasons of aesthetics if nothing else.

This is a situation in which you might consider using the Limit URL Length feature with stopwords (and/or smart stopwords).

[Joe Ward]

After looking at your forum, with such great keywords, I would not recommend using the Limit URL Length feature. I think you will do better with your existing format.

[BamaStangGuy]

I'd leave it as you have it now.

[Future]

WE have setup 5 word limit for all our URIs

[Brandon Sheley]

I read on matt cutt's site or google webmaster tools that about 130 chars is as long as you want the URL

[Future]

I read on matt cutt's site or google webmaster tools that about 130 chars is as long as you want the URL

I guess 128 chars is best limit ?

[Joe Ward]

That's quite a lengthy URL at 130 characters. Most CRUs should fall well within that range.