I am an absolute advocate for rich urls - they improve user experience, especially now browsers such as Chrome are limiting the visibility of page titles. The

I am an absolute advocate for rich urls - they improve user experience, especially now browsers such as Chrome are limiting the visibility of page titles. The SEO benefits are undisputed, and in general I'd always recommend. There is still a case for Devil's Advocate here though. Consider one of the most popular internet properties, Youtube. Youtube could switch on rich urls tomorrow, but they don't. In industry where pageviews are king and you have trusted branding (no shock redirects), then I believe Youtube's ugly hash urls might well benefit them. More than a few times I've visited links which I otherwise wouldn't have if the title was embedded in the url. Occasionally I've been pleasantly surprised by the content and stayed to watch. Considering the hokey titles of some of the better content, I think their url structure might genuinely be a benefit. Also, without their structure there would be no oHg5SJYRHA0 A few other large properties use this (flickr...), and while I think for early growth you are basically throwing away potential traffic, for sites of a certain level, there could be gains by not having rich url structure - not least they can ignore a bunch of complex DB dupe indexing issues by throwing away titles.