Does URL Length Affect
Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
I was recently perusing results on the leading search engines, I
seemed to notice that long URLs weren't very popular on the first
couple pages for several keywords. That intrigued me, so I
performed a true statistical analysis to see if my observation was
merely a coincidence or a true correlation.
The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries that were
naturally performed last month by myself and three associates
using the two leading search engines and analyzed them. I counted
the characters in the URL (including the http://) and tabulated
the results against the ranking of the URL in the search results.
The tabulated results were finally converted into a normalized
"ranking correlation." The results for each of the two leading
search engines were kept separate so that we could discover any
differences between the two leading search engines for this
factor.Note from Heather: I wrote to Jon,
the author, to ask exactly what he was counting as part of the
URL. Here is his reply:
"URLs lengths are counted just like they
are displayed on Google/Yahoo... with the http:// and the www and
even a trailing slash if that is what is displayed."
The resulting graphs show the results for groupings of URL lengths
normalized into a number between -100 and +100 showing the
likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows
that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages
of the studied value ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another
value. A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the
proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank
LOWER than pages of another value. Numbers in between show the
varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between - 100 and
+100.
That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have
the URL lengths starting with a grouping of URLs that were 11-20
characters long and continuing with each group of 10 URL lengths
up until 61-70. Here are the graphs for the two leading search
engines:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/ddy03.jpg http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/ddg03.jpg
The URL lengths were grouped in this way in order to increase the
number of data points available. Unfortunately it also reduces the
precision of the results. It is possible to tell that URL lengths
from 21- 30 rank much higher than URLs of lengths 61-70, but you
are unable to see if URLs of a length of 22 rank differently than
URLs of a length of 24 (for example). I did not list the grouping
of URLs of a length of 1-10 because the number of data points were
too small to accurately calculate a ranking correlation. I did not
show any URLs longer than 70 characters for the same reason.
The result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines rank
sites having URLs between 11 and 30 characters (inclusive) much
higher than any other URL length studied!
Notes:
1. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords.
I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself
and three associates during the month.
2. This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined
from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully
entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far
distant from the factor we studied.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors of the
Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at
SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF reports, please
visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
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