Previous SEO company made ridiculous URLs that are very long - should I change them?

[HoosierBuff]

I have a roofing client that used another SEO company who has absolutely ridiculous urls. I hate to change urls, but, man, I really hate these urls.

The urls are like:

https://nameofbizroofing.com/residential-roofing-contractor-name-of-roofing-company-again-city1-city2-city3-city4-state/roofing-type/

I'm reluctant to change urls - I try to minimize anything that could go wrong. These pages get about 15% of the sites overall traffic. I see no real organic gain from this, just elimination of previous stupidity. What would you do?

 

[Conor Treacy]

For us, we would change them and set a 301 redirect. URLs that appear spammy to the eye will appear spammy to Google. Whether they appear that way to Google now or if that's a future thing for Google, I don't recall, but you can bet it will come down the pipe eventually.

I'm not saying that it should just be /roofing/ bit it certainly shouldn't be 10+ words either.

We actually just did a home inspection site with crazy URLs too, swapped them around and set 301 redirects. Traffic has increased on pages, but more to do with our other tasks than just the URL change itself.

 

[djbaxter]

For us, we would change them and set a 301 redirect. URLs that appear spammy to the eye will appear spammy to Google.

They would probably also appear spammy to prospective customers.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Agree 100% with @Conor Treacy and @djbaxter. Looking at your time on the forum, I'm sure you've had to do redirects before, but just in case, there are several great 301 redirect tools for Wordpress. Also, depending on your hosting, you may not need a redirect plugin. For example, Siteground has a super easy redirect feature under their Site Tools.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I would definitely change them and 301 the old ones to the new ones.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Thank you all! I will be making the change. I will let you know if we see any difference (it will be hard to tell given everything else we are doing - but I will report back anyway!)