Real Estate SEO - Page title and URL best practices (importing pay attention)

[Morgan]

Morning all,

Today I was doing an audit on www.colganteam.com, which went live the other day and I noticed a few of his blogs that were ranking in Google went to broken pages.

It should not have happened, as we imported his blogs from his past WordPress site - so I decided to investigate.

What I found was that it was only happening on blogs with extremely long filenames (from the previous platform) - it’s an easy fix (@WesMartin and @matthutchings are on it), but since I’m here, I wanted to take the time to drop some best practice advice for titles (and filenames) for @ChrisColgan and the rest of our real estate SEO fans in the room

Ok - so why are those filenames so long in the first place?

On his old platform, Brivity (and REW works this way to) - the filename is automatically generated from the page title (your most important SEO element).

In general (if you write your titles using best practices), this is totally fine. (though I like to go in and shorten my filenames to make them cleaner).

But what happens when your title is WAY too long? Well, you end up with a really long filename.

In REW - we have an upper limit of characters for filename (since you never should have a 10,000-character filename) but Brivity does not (nor does WordPress I don’t think).

Here’s an example filename (that is too long) URL in Google /prince-william-county-fair-2025-virginias-largest-county-fair-returns-to-manassas-for-9-days-of-family-fun

So what’s the best practice? Well since that filename (and all blog filenames unless you edit them) are derived from the page title - the solution or best practice is to write a shorter title.

And you WANT to do this.

Here’s why:

The page title is what shows up in Google and other search engines, but there is an upper limit of how many characters will show (it’s around 60 characters)

So when you’re writing any CMS page or blog post, you should aim for 60 characters or less in your title (including spaces) so that you can ensure the page title reads well and is not cut off

By optimizing your page title in this way, you can improve “CTR” (click through rate)

Here’s what it should look like:

You see how Screaming Frog has “The Ultimate Guide To Page Titles” < That’s the title.

In their case, it’s 33 characters with spaces - looks great, says what’s on the page, and even has ultimate to get the users interest piqued.

So for the blog example above - how could we shorten the title (in the future)

How about something like:

“Prince William Fair Returns To Manassas For 2025”

That’s 49 characters. It fits nicely.

But if you REALLY wanted to squeeze something else in there (Family Fun) or (9 days only) something - then you still have room for a small hook

2025 Prince William Fair Returns To Manassas (9 days only) < This is 59 characters and still fits

Now for the filename (REW Blogs) it will automatically create it for you (and it will also be shorter)

While that is already better - I like to cut off any excess for a cleaner filename but still keep it descriptive:

So here is what I would personally do

Hope this helps you bloggers out there

[Morgan]

Incidentally the irony is not lost on me that this forum software also has a similar affliction (I did not create it lol)

But in this case, I write “for the forums first” (and Google second, though I like that Google picks it up) - so since our forums show more of the “title” in the various feeds like latest on the right - I don’t limit myself ot 60 chars when posting here - BUT I do still try to get the most important parts I want to rank for or catch users eyes with on the left (in the first 60 chars)

[Morgan]

Last one, then I have to go to the office

We should tell you what to do in this specific situation:

A: You have a lot of existing blogs with really long URL’s you want to import into REW.
B: Those blogs already have some rankings (and potentially some backlinks)

There are 2 solutions, but one is the best practice.

Solution A:

You can use the 301 redirect tool, and redirect those old URLs to new shorter ones (I would not do this, but you can, and 301 is the appropriate redirect)

It’s under Tools > redirect rules

(note, if you have URL’s that cannot be replicated in the REW system like old .aspx files etc, then you MUST use the redirect tool)

Solution B:

You can have the programming team increase the character limit for filenames (do this “before” importing or they will get cut off) - and then going forward, just read my advice above and start writing shorter titles in the future.

Note to @FernandoOrtiz - I know this release comes out in a week, but for “next release” - just to give us a bit more flex, can you increase the charater limit on blogs, so this is less of an issue for those long URL bloggers coming over?

DankA!

[FernandoOrtiz]

@Morgan

Note to @FernandoOrtiz - I know this release comes out in a week, but for “next release” - just to give us a bit more flex, can you increase the charater limit on blogs, so this is less of an issue for those long URL bloggers coming over?

I’ve created a ticket for us to address this on the next release

[Paul]

For some reason Google continues to mark many of my Blog posts by adding an .html at the end and showing a redirect, although these are not redirected? Is there anything that can be added to show Google the site is not an .html site? Although the same pages are indexed without the .html.

Many of my early blog articles (about 20) are still not indexed by Google after 18 months or so. “Page is not indexed: Alternate page with proper canonical tag”. Although when I check, REW did add the (link rel=“canonical” and the title with the trailing slash/) as Google requests to select this page as the page to index. I have requested indexing multiple times from Google.

[Morgan]

Is there a setting in Search Console that allows you to set a preferred version?

[Morgan]

@Paul

Many of my early blog articles (about 20) are still not indexed by Google after 18 months or so.

Also - not all pages get indexed (especially if they only have a link or two internally and no external links) - blogs as they get older tend to fall of the main page (to page 20 over the years or whatever)

Google has a crawl budget, and the more authority you have, the deeper / more often they will crawl, but it’s not uncommon for real estate websites to have thousands of non index pages, especially given the nature of IDX which (for the most part) is duplicate / thin content. (sometimes blogs can end up in this bucket)

There are things you can do to improve the chances of specific blogs getting (and staying) in the index - a lot of which has to do with linking contextually from topic specific main pages and including them in pillar structures (or if you want to get fancier you can also dynamically tag your blogs from your listings etc too)

The best strategy of course is to write link worthy content that external sources link directly to - if you do that, they are far more likely to stay in the index

More best practices here - Google why is my page not indexed