The last couple of days I’ve noticed that Google has been changing the way that it displays long URLs on the organic search engine results pages (SERP) on Google UK and .com.

So for a keyword that is in the end of the URL, instead of the beginning they are displaying:

www.domainname.com/…/your-keywords-are-here

instead of the full URL

www.domainname.com/some-directory/your-keywords-are-here

It is most visible for longer phrases, where there are more likely to be results with longer URLs. E.g. here is a search for [paris hotels champs elysees]

This result also shows up the fact that they don’t always take out characters at the directory level as in the sofitel result where the actual URL is http://www.sofitel.com/gb/hotel-1184-sofitel-paris-champs-elysees/index.shtml. So Google have snipped the number and the repeat of sofitel out of the URL.

If you want to see what they previously did, compare this Flickr screenshot from search_engine_city from March with the current results for a search for [bosch replacement oven shelves]

See that the URLs are much shorter, and some used to break onto two lines – this does seem to still be possible to happen if Google can’ t find good “cutting points” but there is a preference for a displayed URL that is less than about 72 characters.

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