What makes a "friendly URL"?

Asked 2009-02-06T22:23:07.230

I've read a great deal of discussion recently (both on this site and elsewhere) about "friendly URLs" but I'm not sure what exactly makes a URL "friendly" and why we really even care (up to a certain point). Illustration:

The following is an example of a URL that would be held up by the majority of current web developers as "friendly":

www.myblog.com/posts/123/this-is-the-name-of-my-blog-post

Whereas this would be considered "unfriendly" (i.e. bad, Neanderthal, ignorant, stupid):

www.myblog.com/posts.aspx?id=123

My questions:

Doesn't the "friendly" URL contain duplicate identifying information about the blog post in question? In other words, once you have the id (123) of the post, why do you need the title? Wouldn't this be a violation of the "don't repeat yourself" mantra?
What difference does the form of a URL make as far as users are concerned? Do users ever actually type full URLs by hand (other than the TLD, of course)? Do users ever look to the URL of a page to determine what the page is about? Why do we need the title of the blog post in the URL? Isn't that what the page's <title> tag and content are for?
I often hear SEO as a reason why the "friendly" URL form is preferred. Why does a search engine spider care about the URL? Aren't they just automated pieces of software that crawl pages (and the links to other pages that are contained within them)? If search engines were written like other software components (e.g. database access components), the URL would just be a meaningless identifier (similar to a rowguid in a relational database) to them. If I were designing a database schema with something like the "friendly" URL above as a table's primary key, I would (quite correctly) get chewed out.

I said earlier "up to a point" because obviously, URLs can get out of hand.

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4 Answers

Tim Berners-Lee (the architect of the WWW) wrote a great article about this subject about 10 years ago.

Your example is a bad URL -- but not just because it has both an id and a "slug" (the abbreviated, hyphenated form of the page title). Putting the page title into your URL is problematic in the long term. Content will change over time. If you ever change the title of that blog post, you'll be forced to choose between keeping the old URL, or changing the URL to match the new title. Changing the URL will break any previous links to that page; and not changing it means you'll have a URL that doesn't match the page. Neither is good for the user. Better to just go with www.myblog.com/posts/123.
Users often do need to type a URL, but more importantly, sometimes they'll also edit existing URLs to find other pages in your site. Thus, it's often good to have discoverable URLs. For example, if I want to see post #124, I could easily look at the current URL and figure that the URL for the page I want to see is www.myblog.com/posts/124. That's a level of user-friendliness that can be a big help to people trying to find what they're looking for. Including other information (like the subject of the post) can make this impossible -- so it reduces my exploration options.
Forget about SEO. Search engine technology has been reducing the effectiveness of SEO hacks for some time. Good content is still king -- and in the long run, you won't be able to game the system.

answered 2009-02-06T22:37:29.383

As for:

Wouldn't this be a violation of the "don't repeat yourself" mantra?

That refers to the application CODE!!, not the application it self!!

It makes complete sense to have

Title in the <title> tag
In the URL
And as first line in the content.

And pretty much everywhere else the content need it.

What that "mantra" refers if the your code should look like this:

  <title><%=obj.getTitle()%></title>
  Reading:<h1><%=obj.getTitle()%></h1>
  Link to this:<a href="getHrefFor( object.getTitle() )">obj.getTitle()</a>
  Etc. etc.

Instead of having different methods with copy/pasted code all around your app.

answered 2009-02-13T22:31:21.327

Matt and @bigmattyh: SEO is not "hacks": it's understanding what "good content" means on the web. Page titles are part of the content. Good anchor text in links is "good content" (rather than using words like "click here" as the link text). Placing links in context rather than as a list is "good content".

Page titles are low-hanging fruit, but they remain one of the easiest ways to improve SERP. Yes, inbound links (and their quality) are critical, but titles can do wonders, particularly in the short-term. You don't have to use the page title (which may change from time to time) as the post title: summarize the content manually.

Don't guess on this stuff: (a) read sources like SEOmoz.org and (b) analyze your own site rigorously.

answered 2010-01-29T17:29:44.903

The term readable url is also used a lot. Using friendly/readable urls is a SEO born technique and that is about it. Otherwise the shorter the path the better. Doing rewrite rules usually slows the process of getting the page fast to the client so take that in consideration as well.

answered 2010-04-12T11:55:44.653

What makes a "friendly URL"?

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