Does the length of a URL matter in terms of SEO?

• I'm wondering if the length of a URL matters. Does a short URL have any SEO advantage over a long one? And, is there any such thing as a URL that's too long for Google to index?

Answer:

The short answer is No.

Length does not matter to Google — they use the URL strictly as an identifier and it doesn't matter how long it is.

However, it's clear that people prefer short URLs, the shorter the better because they are easier to share and remember.

It also doesn't matter how many slashes you have in your URLs.

According to John Mueller who recently answered a similar question in an #AskGooglebot segment by saying...

I'm currently only aware of one part of our systems where the URL length plays a role. That part is canonicalization. Canonicalization is what happens when we find multiple copies of a page on your website and we have to pick one URL to use for indexing. If we find a shorter and cleaner URL, our systems tend to select that one. This does not affect ranking. It's purely a matter of which URL is shown in search.

Here's his complete answer in the video...