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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.
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:
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,
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