does anyone experiene or have ideas on how long your urls should get for google - do you think it penalises when it gets too long? I have just changed my urls to make them all seo friendly and have been penalised heavily. Has anyone else experienced this (maybe only one or two keywords in url is the way forward). Interested in other experiences Neil www.algarverentalapartments.com
It sounds to me like you have changed the URL www.example.com/rental/ to rental www.example.com/algarve/villa/for-rent.html If so, no matter if you done a 301R from the first to the new one, its pretty normal to loose some rankings for a while. But by the way, I think you have not choosen the best moment to apply changes to yuor site a mesure the effect in google.
I don't think the length matters, but new url's = no ranking. You could 301 from the old addresses to the new, might save them.
The length of the url should not be a problem. In fact it may be cool to use a lengthy phrase as the name of your site like www.theendjustifiesthemeans.com That url does not exist, I just made it up. You may be able to do your domain name research and come up with some novel names for your sites based on famous quotes. Genius.
From my point of view urls length doesn't matter as long as they're memorable. I always have trouble when trying to recall godaddy's buy/sell domains site. First I think: the domain name after market, and then extract the initials. Perhaps it's just me . Of course, you always have the bookmarks.