8 ms·

Ask HN: SEO impact of HN's URL “itemid” vs. an actual title?

51 points by a_small_island 11y ago

What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? Is there an SEO impact? For instance, a url on reddit may be: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ea7ee/what_would_the_horizon_look_like_if_you_were/ while a link on HN looks like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11465163

dragonbonheur 11y ago
HN wasn't intended to be used as a tool to improve your SEO. It may increase your visibility to actual people or you may sometimes, through HN, get noticed by other websites but don't expect it to directly lead to an improvement in the SERPS.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  I think the question may be regarding indexing HN itself, not the sites-linked-to. If I wanted to find discussion about "what would a horizon look like ... " by searching those terms, would reddit be favored because of those terms in the URL?
  - siquick 11y ago
    It depends on a multitude of factors but a huge weighting will be given to the page with the largest number of high quality links pointing to the site. Notice i said 'high quality'... The URL structure isn't always that important, but it helps.
    - wyldfire 11y ago
      > The URL structure isn't always that important, but it helps. If that's the case then all else aside the answer to the question being asked is, "Yes, there is an impact" and perhaps "but it's not significant enough to justify changing HN"
  - dragonbonheur 11y ago
    HN has a search service that does not use Google. Use that instead. Or from Google use "site:news.ycombinator.com" after your keywords to restrict google searches to HN.
    - wyldfire 11y ago
      I'll concede that the goal of the asker ( a_small_island) is not crystal clear but I think you should re-read what's being asked. I doubt it's "I wish someone could tell me how to search for things on HN" more likely it's "Why did HN do it this way? Wouldn't it have been better this other way? Or perhaps is there nothing at all to be gained?" IOW the goal is to understand the motivation behind the different approaches between reddit and HN.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
romanovcode 11y ago
There is an SEO impact, however HN is not that oriented on general public and it has no ads so it doesn't really matter.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  > There is an SEO impact, Any source for that?
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Technically "no" the SEO goals for HN would appear to be unaffected by the choice :-). And in this case its actually a good thing. If you scroll through the /new pages as I do you will see that a lot of people try to use HN like Reddit as an SEO tool to get more views to their web site. That can be facilitated by a link baity headline cum URI which gets indexed with the keywords of interest of the day. By simply putting 'itemid' in the link text HN gives very little "link love" to keywords and so is not as easily exploited by "digital presence" folks (aka people who try to SEO their client's sites or products).
primaryobjects 11y ago
I can think of a couple of impacts: - Shorter urls are easier to copy and share. + Keywords in the url may increase search engine rank. + Full title in the url helps readers know what they're clicking. There are advantages to having the full title in the url for both SEM and readers. However, as others mention, HN wasn't designed for SEM and contains no ads to profit from it.
- chipperyman573 11y ago
  >Full title in the url helps readers know what they're clicking. Almost every website I've seen lets you re-write the url. For example, https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/something https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/something and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/anything https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/anything both go to the same link.
  - accounthere 11y ago
    HN could simply add a '&title='. No need to change anything in their routes, just change the link in the main page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11472694&title=ask-hn-seo-impact-of-hns-url https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11472694&title=ask-hn-s...
dsp1234 11y ago
What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? It's easy to code Is there an SEO impact? Probably, but as SEO is search engine optimization, if a site doesn't care about search engines, then it also probably doesn't care about optimization of those searches.
- tiffinperiod 11y ago
  SEO works easily
- awinder 11y ago
  To be fair putting a title and an item id is nearly as easy to code, just the "overhead" of a rewrite rule.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    It's not exactly a huge amount of work, but validating and sluggifying text is also part of it.
krapp 11y ago
I'm pretty sure HN doesn't want urls to provide an SEO boost either for themselves or the people submitting - and if so, I would tend to agree with them. It's well know that pg doesn't want this site to have mainstream appeal, so having HN articles list high in search engines would probably be a problem they would want to avoid, but also, submitters shouldn't have an incentive to use this site to boost their own SEO by submitting low-quality linkspam. If it were me, I would go even further and route every link through a dereferring proxy just to mess with their analytics as well, and block everyone except maybe IA through robots.txt. For a site which is meant to be about discussion and thought-provoking stories and not content aggregation for the sake of ad revenue, I think SEO is a cancer.
tiffinperiod 11y ago
Nice post
pgfrd 11y ago
A site doesn't need to be selling something (ads) to implement good SEO What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? Like someone previously mentioned, easier to code, less thought required around site architecture and optimization Is there an SEO impact? Yes, from a basic standpoint, descriptive URLs are easier to crawl, index, and rank accordingly. They help readers find info better when searching for questions + answers From a more highlevel standpoint, descriptive URLs and an optimized site structure helps in many ways including SEO, analytics, accessibility, and more. Reddit does it well
- gnaritas 11y ago
  > What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? The reason is because it's the minimum information required to do the job. HN was built to function by PG who built it old school as a demonstration of his custom programming language, it's clearly not been optimized for SEO and putting a slug in the URL adds nothing functionally and thus the engineer had no reason to add that feature. It also uses tables for layout, has embedded style information, and saves all state to files on disk using no database. It's hardly a "best practices" type application.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  > Yes, from a basic standpoint, descriptive URLs are easier to crawl, index, and rank accordingly. Why are they easier to crawl and index? Most people do shoot themselves in the foot with some duplicate content if they try to implement those speaking URLs. And "rank accordingly"? Like keyword tags help to rank better?
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Why does the URL text matter for SEO? Wouldn't a crawler be looking at the page content?
chejazi 11y ago
What you are referring to is a "slug" [1] which adds another searchable dimension to the content. This appeals to marketers trying to add searchable keywords to boost discovery. Not having one won't affect HN since "everything's present" in the forum. For instance, if you google the title of your post it is ranked #1 in the search results [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%27s+URL+%E2%80%9Citemid%E2%80%9D+vs.+an+actual+title%3F&oq=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%27s+URL+%E2%80%9Citemid%E2%80%9D+vs.+an+actual+title%3F& https://www.google.com/search?q=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%2...
bhartzer 11y ago
Frankly, the usage of having keywords in the URL is a very minimal factor. If everything were equal for a URL with the keywords in the URL and one without, there wouldn't be much more of a benefit to the one with the keywords in the URL. However, if your overall site structure is one that has topics and subtopics or categories and subcategories, it would help the user see that site structure. For example, in the reddit example above, users can get directly to the askscience subreddit by removing part of the URL and going directly to https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/. Setting up URLs like this is a good practice, the URL would then follow the site's breadcrumb trail. For H/N, I don't really see any benefit, at this point, for using keywords in the URLs. There's just no SEO benefit.
cromulent 11y ago
When I Google for "SEO actual title" this page is the first result. https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=seo+actual+title&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=seo+actual+title&ie=U...
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  That's a fairly specific search term though. I'm not sure I'd use that as the only evidence that it doesn't matter.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    It's really not that specific. It's not the only evidence that it doesn't matter, but if google can pick up on a 3 word query (one of them being "seo", an extremely competitive keyword) in <30 mins then it's safe to say hn is doing fine.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      Google polls sites that provide primarily discussions regularly. Doing an exact query match makes the most sense to do as step 1 of a query. So even if HN was trying to actively prevent this I think Google would still have an easy time.
      - dsp1234 11y ago
        exact query match You keep saying exact query match, but commenter above used 3 non-consecutive words out of the 12 words in the title, and did not use any sort of quoted search text. Indeed, it even works with just two words out of the title: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+actual https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+actual The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking.
        BinaryIdiot 11y ago
        > You keep saying exact query match Only said it once =/ > The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking. A single data point absolutely does not indicate whether the id in the URL affects SEO or not. Your Google search is context specific (to you) so I would certainly expect it to show up near or at the top. But what about those who have never touched that page or even have gone to HN? The more specific the title the better overall but none of this gives us data about the id in the URL being good or bad for SEO. Likely I think it's more of a UX than an SEO thing. But still don't go off a context specific, single data point to decide whether something is true in general or not.
jedberg 11y ago
As the person who wrote the code for the SEO part of the reddit URL, I can tell you that there is definitely an impact. It made a huge difference at the time, because reddit wasn't really on Google's radar. Today I suspect it would have less impact for reddit. For HN, I get the impression that they don't really want to be all that optimized for Google, so it probably hits their goals just fine, but it probably does hurt them a little bit. But since the words are in an H1 right at the top, probably not all that much. Edit: The code in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/cfd979fa0119191257eadc4ccfcada60968984a1/r2/r2/lib/utils/utils.py#L936 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/cfd979fa0119191257eadc...
- tobltobs 11y ago
  Are you sure that the impact was caused by changes in the URL part and not any other changes which were made at the same time.
  - ketralnis 11y ago
    It's impossible to be sure without asking Google, but there weren't many of us at the time and so there weren't many changes to conflate it with.
- avar 11y ago
  To me your comment demonstrates why it's really hard to figure out anything worthwhile about SEO. You wrote that code almost 8 years ago[1]. Google and other search engines have changed a lot since then. Who knows if this has any impact today? Actually did you even A/B test it at the time? Or just turn it on along with a bunch of other changes? It's hard to tell, and there's so much SEO (mis)information out there based on old anecdotes, and all the players doing A/B testing for this sort of thing on a big scale keep their data to themselves. 1. https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/353ad2a https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/353ad2a
  - jedberg 11y ago
    We did not A/B test it, but we didn't release many changes at the same time either, so it's hard to say for sure, but we were pretty sure it made a difference. Also, SEO is not supposed to be easy, Google purposely makes it hard. They don't want you to be successful (with good reason). They've always said, make good content that easy for a human to find and Google will find it too. That's probably the best SEO advice you can get.
ajonit 11y ago
HN doesnt really care. Even if slugs didn't provide any SEO benefit, I would implement them purely for usability reasons. xyz.com/learn-seo looks much better to a user compared to xyz.com/46765475
accounthere 11y ago
I don't think search engines are the main source of readers for HN.
return0 11y ago
I never understood why a slug should be considered a signal.
- chrismarlow9 11y ago
  These might be a few: - Though it's not much more difficult, it does show you spent a little more effort on the website to not just leave the pk there. I would think this would be more relevant for sites not using a framework like wordpress (which we absolutely know from search results filters that google can categorize sites in this way...) - Legacy... older websites that are pure static pages will likely have good keywords in the file name, since it would be maintained primarily by humans looking at directories of files. - Social significance. The link would be more likely to have a better social impact because the content of the page could be determined whether its an anchor tag, posted in irc, or sent in gmail. You might argue that just because the page name has the keywords doesnt mean the content is about that, but I would argue google can quickly detect and demote those kind of things (aka the page title is only really relevant to your seo if it's also relevant to the content... otherwise it's essentially just a random primary key). Just my thoughts...
  - return0 11y ago
    I find all these 3 are contrary to the definition of a URL, and the whole idea of using slugs just screams "game me".
brudgers 11y ago
My understanding is that originally [and perhaps currently] Hacker News uses the file system for storage and that the id number is the name of a file on disk. A few years ago, I recall a discussion about a reorganization of the files from a single [or few?] directories into a more broadly branched tree. The basis for doing IIRC so was to improve performance. My impression is that this would be a simple way to produce a RESTful interface. When the resource is a file on disk, how complex does application layer routing have to be? Anyway, my guess is that general SEO is not particularly high on the list of features to implement. On the other hand, if adding Algolia and the API then it's another story. That was also a substantial improvement to the feature set. It might even turn up the aforementioned discussion about the file system hierarchy [I think PG wrote the post]. Good luck.
BorisMelnik 11y ago
As a user, I would find it helpful to have a more human readable permalink / slug for the "at a quick glance" purposes. As someone w/ some knowledge of SEO, it would most likely add value as well.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  Isn't the link text human readable enough?
giarcyevod 11y ago
Doing 'SEO' is like punching smoke. Build for those visiting and using your website.

dragonbonheur 11y ago

HN wasn't intended to be used as a tool to improve your SEO. It may increase your visibility to actual people or you may sometimes, through HN, get noticed by other websites but don't expect it to directly lead to an improvement in the SERPS.

wyldfire 11y ago
I think the question may be regarding indexing HN itself, not the sites-linked-to. If I wanted to find discussion about "what would a horizon look like ... " by searching those terms, would reddit be favored because of those terms in the URL?
- siquick 11y ago
  It depends on a multitude of factors but a huge weighting will be given to the page with the largest number of high quality links pointing to the site. Notice i said 'high quality'... The URL structure isn't always that important, but it helps.
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    > The URL structure isn't always that important, but it helps. If that's the case then all else aside the answer to the question being asked is, "Yes, there is an impact" and perhaps "but it's not significant enough to justify changing HN"
- dragonbonheur 11y ago
  HN has a search service that does not use Google. Use that instead. Or from Google use "site:news.ycombinator.com" after your keywords to restrict google searches to HN.
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    I'll concede that the goal of the asker ( a_small_island) is not crystal clear but I think you should re-read what's being asked. I doubt it's "I wish someone could tell me how to search for things on HN" more likely it's "Why did HN do it this way? Wouldn't it have been better this other way? Or perhaps is there nothing at all to be gained?" IOW the goal is to understand the motivation behind the different approaches between reddit and HN.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

romanovcode 11y ago

There is an SEO impact, however HN is not that oriented on general public and it has no ads so it doesn't really matter.

tobltobs 11y ago
> There is an SEO impact, Any source for that?

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Technically "no" the SEO goals for HN would appear to be unaffected by the choice :-). And in this case its actually a good thing. If you scroll through the /new pages as I do you will see that a lot of people try to use HN like Reddit as an SEO tool to get more views to their web site. That can be facilitated by a link baity headline cum URI which gets indexed with the keywords of interest of the day. By simply putting 'itemid' in the link text HN gives very little "link love" to keywords and so is not as easily exploited by "digital presence" folks (aka people who try to SEO their client's sites or products).

primaryobjects 11y ago

I can think of a couple of impacts: - Shorter urls are easier to copy and share. + Keywords in the url may increase search engine rank. + Full title in the url helps readers know what they're clicking. There are advantages to having the full title in the url for both SEM and readers. However, as others mention, HN wasn't designed for SEM and contains no ads to profit from it.

chipperyman573 11y ago
>Full title in the url helps readers know what they're clicking. Almost every website I've seen lets you re-write the url. For example, https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/something https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/something and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/anything https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/anything both go to the same link.
- accounthere 11y ago
  HN could simply add a '&title='. No need to change anything in their routes, just change the link in the main page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11472694&title=ask-hn-seo-impact-of-hns-url https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11472694&title=ask-hn-s...

dsp1234 11y ago

What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? It's easy to code Is there an SEO impact? Probably, but as SEO is search engine optimization, if a site doesn't care about search engines, then it also probably doesn't care about optimization of those searches.

tiffinperiod 11y ago
SEO works easily
awinder 11y ago
To be fair putting a title and an item id is nearly as easy to code, just the "overhead" of a rewrite rule.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  It's not exactly a huge amount of work, but validating and sluggifying text is also part of it.

krapp 11y ago

I'm pretty sure HN doesn't want urls to provide an SEO boost either for themselves or the people submitting - and if so, I would tend to agree with them. It's well know that pg doesn't want this site to have mainstream appeal, so having HN articles list high in search engines would probably be a problem they would want to avoid, but also, submitters shouldn't have an incentive to use this site to boost their own SEO by submitting low-quality linkspam. If it were me, I would go even further and route every link through a dereferring proxy just to mess with their analytics as well, and block everyone except maybe IA through robots.txt. For a site which is meant to be about discussion and thought-provoking stories and not content aggregation for the sake of ad revenue, I think SEO is a cancer.

tiffinperiod 11y ago

Nice post

pgfrd 11y ago

A site doesn't need to be selling something (ads) to implement good SEO What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? Like someone previously mentioned, easier to code, less thought required around site architecture and optimization Is there an SEO impact? Yes, from a basic standpoint, descriptive URLs are easier to crawl, index, and rank accordingly. They help readers find info better when searching for questions + answers From a more highlevel standpoint, descriptive URLs and an optimized site structure helps in many ways including SEO, analytics, accessibility, and more. Reddit does it well

gnaritas 11y ago
> What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN? The reason is because it's the minimum information required to do the job. HN was built to function by PG who built it old school as a demonstration of his custom programming language, it's clearly not been optimized for SEO and putting a slug in the URL adds nothing functionally and thus the engineer had no reason to add that feature. It also uses tables for layout, has embedded style information, and saves all state to files on disk using no database. It's hardly a "best practices" type application.
tobltobs 11y ago
> Yes, from a basic standpoint, descriptive URLs are easier to crawl, index, and rank accordingly. Why are they easier to crawl and index? Most people do shoot themselves in the foot with some duplicate content if they try to implement those speaking URLs. And "rank accordingly"? Like keyword tags help to rank better?

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

Why does the URL text matter for SEO? Wouldn't a crawler be looking at the page content?

chejazi 11y ago

What you are referring to is a "slug" [1] which adds another searchable dimension to the content. This appeals to marketers trying to add searchable keywords to boost discovery. Not having one won't affect HN since "everything's present" in the forum. For instance, if you google the title of your post it is ranked #1 in the search results [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%27s+URL+%E2%80%9Citemid%E2%80%9D+vs.+an+actual+title%3F&oq=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%27s+URL+%E2%80%9Citemid%E2%80%9D+vs.+an+actual+title%3F& https://www.google.com/search?q=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%2...

bhartzer 11y ago

Frankly, the usage of having keywords in the URL is a very minimal factor. If everything were equal for a URL with the keywords in the URL and one without, there wouldn't be much more of a benefit to the one with the keywords in the URL. However, if your overall site structure is one that has topics and subtopics or categories and subcategories, it would help the user see that site structure. For example, in the reddit example above, users can get directly to the askscience subreddit by removing part of the URL and going directly to https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/. Setting up URLs like this is a good practice, the URL would then follow the site's breadcrumb trail. For H/N, I don't really see any benefit, at this point, for using keywords in the URLs. There's just no SEO benefit.

cromulent 11y ago

When I Google for "SEO actual title" this page is the first result. https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=seo+actual+title&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=seo+actual+title&ie=U...

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
That's a fairly specific search term though. I'm not sure I'd use that as the only evidence that it doesn't matter.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  It's really not that specific. It's not the only evidence that it doesn't matter, but if google can pick up on a 3 word query (one of them being "seo", an extremely competitive keyword) in <30 mins then it's safe to say hn is doing fine.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Google polls sites that provide primarily discussions regularly. Doing an exact query match makes the most sense to do as step 1 of a query. So even if HN was trying to actively prevent this I think Google would still have an easy time.
    - dsp1234 11y ago
      exact query match You keep saying exact query match, but commenter above used 3 non-consecutive words out of the 12 words in the title, and did not use any sort of quoted search text. Indeed, it even works with just two words out of the title: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+actual https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+actual The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking.
      - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
        > You keep saying exact query match Only said it once =/ > The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking. A single data point absolutely does not indicate whether the id in the URL affects SEO or not. Your Google search is context specific (to you) so I would certainly expect it to show up near or at the top. But what about those who have never touched that page or even have gone to HN? The more specific the title the better overall but none of this gives us data about the id in the URL being good or bad for SEO. Likely I think it's more of a UX than an SEO thing. But still don't go off a context specific, single data point to decide whether something is true in general or not.

jedberg 11y ago

As the person who wrote the code for the SEO part of the reddit URL, I can tell you that there is definitely an impact. It made a huge difference at the time, because reddit wasn't really on Google's radar. Today I suspect it would have less impact for reddit. For HN, I get the impression that they don't really want to be all that optimized for Google, so it probably hits their goals just fine, but it probably does hurt them a little bit. But since the words are in an H1 right at the top, probably not all that much. Edit: The code in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/cfd979fa0119191257eadc4ccfcada60968984a1/r2/r2/lib/utils/utils.py#L936 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/cfd979fa0119191257eadc...

tobltobs 11y ago
Are you sure that the impact was caused by changes in the URL part and not any other changes which were made at the same time.
- ketralnis 11y ago
  It's impossible to be sure without asking Google, but there weren't many of us at the time and so there weren't many changes to conflate it with.
avar 11y ago
To me your comment demonstrates why it's really hard to figure out anything worthwhile about SEO. You wrote that code almost 8 years ago[1]. Google and other search engines have changed a lot since then. Who knows if this has any impact today? Actually did you even A/B test it at the time? Or just turn it on along with a bunch of other changes? It's hard to tell, and there's so much SEO (mis)information out there based on old anecdotes, and all the players doing A/B testing for this sort of thing on a big scale keep their data to themselves. 1. https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/353ad2a https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/353ad2a
- jedberg 11y ago
  We did not A/B test it, but we didn't release many changes at the same time either, so it's hard to say for sure, but we were pretty sure it made a difference. Also, SEO is not supposed to be easy, Google purposely makes it hard. They don't want you to be successful (with good reason). They've always said, make good content that easy for a human to find and Google will find it too. That's probably the best SEO advice you can get.

ajonit 11y ago

HN doesnt really care. Even if slugs didn't provide any SEO benefit, I would implement them purely for usability reasons. xyz.com/learn-seo looks much better to a user compared to xyz.com/46765475

accounthere 11y ago

I don't think search engines are the main source of readers for HN.

return0 11y ago

I never understood why a slug should be considered a signal.

chrismarlow9 11y ago
These might be a few: - Though it's not much more difficult, it does show you spent a little more effort on the website to not just leave the pk there. I would think this would be more relevant for sites not using a framework like wordpress (which we absolutely know from search results filters that google can categorize sites in this way...) - Legacy... older websites that are pure static pages will likely have good keywords in the file name, since it would be maintained primarily by humans looking at directories of files. - Social significance. The link would be more likely to have a better social impact because the content of the page could be determined whether its an anchor tag, posted in irc, or sent in gmail. You might argue that just because the page name has the keywords doesnt mean the content is about that, but I would argue google can quickly detect and demote those kind of things (aka the page title is only really relevant to your seo if it's also relevant to the content... otherwise it's essentially just a random primary key). Just my thoughts...
- return0 11y ago
  I find all these 3 are contrary to the definition of a URL, and the whole idea of using slugs just screams "game me".

brudgers 11y ago

My understanding is that originally [and perhaps currently] Hacker News uses the file system for storage and that the id number is the name of a file on disk. A few years ago, I recall a discussion about a reorganization of the files from a single [or few?] directories into a more broadly branched tree. The basis for doing IIRC so was to improve performance. My impression is that this would be a simple way to produce a RESTful interface. When the resource is a file on disk, how complex does application layer routing have to be? Anyway, my guess is that general SEO is not particularly high on the list of features to implement. On the other hand, if adding Algolia and the API then it's another story. That was also a substantial improvement to the feature set. It might even turn up the aforementioned discussion about the file system hierarchy [I think PG wrote the post]. Good luck.

BorisMelnik 11y ago

As a user, I would find it helpful to have a more human readable permalink / slug for the "at a quick glance" purposes. As someone w/ some knowledge of SEO, it would most likely add value as well.

tobltobs 11y ago
Isn't the link text human readable enough?

giarcyevod 11y ago

Doing 'SEO' is like punching smoke. Build for those visiting and using your website.