John Muller has recently said on Twitter that shorter domain names or URLs do not affect the ranking in Google search or SEO in particular. One of the users tweeted that his domain traffic changed considerably when he changed his domain from three words to a single word. As soon as he tweeted, a couple of users chipped in with their take.
John’s Reply
Domain name or URL length is not a factor. Shorter is not better for SEO. Maybe better or easier for marketing, which is separate.
We do use length lightly for canonicalization, but that’s choosing between 2 versions of the same thing (eg, /home/ vs /home/index.html).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 9, 2021
The user gave an example of how a shorter domain received a higher click-through rate, citing the example of Amazon.com changing their name from Amazonstore.com, to which John has cleared that there is no SEO bonus attached to keeping a one-word domain.
I totally disagree from an SEO point of view. I can see how people might like short & sweet domain names, but there’s definitely no SEO bonus attached to them like that.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 9, 2021
In the past, Google has said URL is not a ranking factor, but they do advise to keep URL length upto 2,000 characters.
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