Length of your URL

Google Algorithm Ranking Factors

(Number 115 of the 200)

Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.

Why do we need to do this

Google penalises sites in their search rankings that have excessively long URLs viewing them as keyword stuffing.

What does this mean

A URL is the web address of a page. If you want to read about me, the URL of my about page is http://www.hotelconsultant.com/about/. It is 37 characters long. Google seems to penalise the page results rankings slightly of URLs that are excessively long. It may appear to them to be keyword stuffing. It is recommended you keep your URLs under 75 characters and that the individual page element bit be a maximum of five words.

What do I do: Keep your URLs under 75 characters with the individual page element being a maximum of 5 words. As an example the number of words in the individual page element part of the url of this page is 4 (highlighted in red) http://www.hotelconsultant.com/length-of-your-url/. You can check how many characters are in your URL of each of your pages by clicking here http://string-functions.com/length.aspx and doing the following.

More by Dr. Manus Ward

The Google Algorithm is how Google decides which site to rank number 1. It is top secret but not anymore, here it is. Click here to find out how to implement it in a simple and achievable way in to your hotel.

Google records and shares the keywords your hotel guests search for. Click here to find out how to find out these keywords and how to create content containing the keywords that will rank at the top of Google.

Last generation hotel photos i.e. the ones that don’t have any people in them can significantly reduce the likelihood of guests choosing your hotel. Click here to find out how to create next generation hotel images.

Ranking Factor of the Week: Panda is an algorithm that very heavily penalises low quality content sites and rewards high quality sites with significant amounts of useful content. Click here to find out how to avoid a Panda penalty.