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Who cares about urls? Clean URLs can help developers to better manage their site. This is because they provide an intuitive way to organize site content. By de

by Arjuna 15y ago

Who cares about urls? Clean URLs can help developers to better manage their site. This is because they provide an intuitive way to organize site content. By design, this also means that users can find information easily. As a simple example, imagine surfing an exotic car website. You want to find information about the Koenigsegg Agera. Now, imagine the following two URLs which both point to the page about the Koenigsegg Agera: 1. http://www.example.com/vehicle.aspx?id=0x5F3759DF http://www.example.com/vehicle.aspx?id=0x5F3759DF 2. http://www.example.com/vehicle/koenigsegg_agera http://www.example.com/vehicle/koenigsegg_agera Clearly, the URL in example 2 offers: 1. An intuitive way to navigate the site's content. As a user, you could enter a different vehicle name, using the given URL structure, to locate other vehicles: http://www.example.com/vehicle/ariel_atom http://www.example.com/vehicle/ariel_atom http://www.example.com/vehicle/porsche_918 http://www.example.com/vehicle/porsche_918 2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is a topic unto itself. In general, one of the areas of SEO is optimizing URLs in order to achieve the best results with regard to indexing and ranking. Please see Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (see link, below) for a more in-depth treatment of this topic. References: Clean URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_URL Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (See page 8, "Improve the structure of your URLs") http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza... URL structure http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe... Search Engine Optimization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Xurinos 15y ago
I went through your links to understand the SEO issue, and I am having a hard time finding more than one technical reason to make URLs friendlier. The only thing that stood out to me was along the lines of including searchable keywords in your URL, so indeed, rather than just an ID, having the word "walkman" in Sony's URL would raise their URL score in the search engine. The rest was pure speculation on what "users" do with URLs -- aka some engineer's personal opinion on what's pretty. Can anybody provide links to usability studies regarding what users actually do with URLs? This would be of far more value than some company's personal standard, be it Google or someone else. My experience is unfortunately anecdotal, but all my users just bookmark or copy-paste whatever they see. They are more concerned that the site has good navigation than that they can alter the URL or type it in directly. They use a starting point and then move on from there. So I have a hard time believing statements in these documents like "users may remove a part of the URL, thinking it is not important". The one exception is that I have seen newer users type "www." before URLs that do not need it.
- Arjuna 15y ago
  (I am attempting to repond to both Xurinos and romaniv in a single reply here.) My clean URL example was just an example. I did not intend to infer that the world is primarily navigating via URL manipulation, but it came across that way. Rather, I meant that it can be a nice touch for usability, in certain cases. For example, power users are going to quickly notice, "Hey, I can find a vehicle by manipulating the URL by using the 'manufacturer_carmodel' pattern." Of course, the site would have normal search functionality, so that traditional users could locate vehicles in that manner as well. In the end, it is more about SEO, but with the clean URL paradigm, you get both (again, in some cases), so it can be a win-win. Also, the URLs look nice when they appear in search results (i.e., nice keyword-based URLs instead of URLs with query strings and IDs) which can lend itself to readability/usability. Of course, even with clean URLs, a case where it probably does not work is a blog (as noted by romaniv). For example, no one is going to manipulate a long URL string for a blog posting; they will simply navigate the site for the information. Although, here is a real-world example that I have encountered: I have come across multi-part blog postings via Google searches. In many cases, "Part X" displays in the search results, but not "Part 1." In these cases, it is always nice when these sites are designed with clean URLs, making it a breeze to simply copy the URL from the search results, and change the "X" to "1". Clearly, this is not easy (or possible) to do if the URL is a query string with an unintuitive article ID. Ultimately, I think that clean URLs are about SEO, but I think they can have a usability factor, again, in some cases and well, for "power users" at least. I probably should have said "power users" instead of "users" in my original post.
romaniv 15y ago
An intuitive way to navigate the site's content. This assumes the user knows the correct product name and the rules you use to normalize it (ariel-atom vs arie+atom vs ariel_atom). This not the case for most URLs. I don't remember the exact title for each article in some blog. In fact, I'm more likely to remember http://example.com/?Article.view.1 http://example.com/?Article.view.1 than http://example.com/articles/2010/01/02/This_is_my_article_s_title http://example.com/articles/2010/01/02/This_is_my_article_s_... Please note the underscore between 'e' and 's'. Websites usually normalize their titles when putting them into URLs, and they don't just URL-encode them, because URL encoding looks bad. They use arbitrary normalization and shortening rules. Also, why would the user navigate via URLs instead of using website's UI? I think URLs should be reasonably short and have no junk, but I also think that the whole "put-words-into-urls" movement is driven mostly by SEO considerations that have nothing to do with user experience.

by Arjuna 15y ago

Xurinos 15y ago

I went through your links to understand the SEO issue, and I am having a hard time finding more than one technical reason to make URLs friendlier. The only thing that stood out to me was along the lines of including searchable keywords in your URL, so indeed, rather than just an ID, having the word "walkman" in Sony's URL would raise their URL score in the search engine. The rest was pure speculation on what "users" do with URLs -- aka some engineer's personal opinion on what's pretty. Can anybody provide links to usability studies regarding what users actually do with URLs? This would be of far more value than some company's personal standard, be it Google or someone else. My experience is unfortunately anecdotal, but all my users just bookmark or copy-paste whatever they see. They are more concerned that the site has good navigation than that they can alter the URL or type it in directly. They use a starting point and then move on from there. So I have a hard time believing statements in these documents like "users may remove a part of the URL, thinking it is not important". The one exception is that I have seen newer users type "www." before URLs that do not need it.

Arjuna 15y ago
(I am attempting to repond to both Xurinos and romaniv in a single reply here.) My clean URL example was just an example. I did not intend to infer that the world is primarily navigating via URL manipulation, but it came across that way. Rather, I meant that it can be a nice touch for usability, in certain cases. For example, power users are going to quickly notice, "Hey, I can find a vehicle by manipulating the URL by using the 'manufacturer_carmodel' pattern." Of course, the site would have normal search functionality, so that traditional users could locate vehicles in that manner as well. In the end, it is more about SEO, but with the clean URL paradigm, you get both (again, in some cases), so it can be a win-win. Also, the URLs look nice when they appear in search results (i.e., nice keyword-based URLs instead of URLs with query strings and IDs) which can lend itself to readability/usability. Of course, even with clean URLs, a case where it probably does not work is a blog (as noted by romaniv). For example, no one is going to manipulate a long URL string for a blog posting; they will simply navigate the site for the information. Although, here is a real-world example that I have encountered: I have come across multi-part blog postings via Google searches. In many cases, "Part X" displays in the search results, but not "Part 1." In these cases, it is always nice when these sites are designed with clean URLs, making it a breeze to simply copy the URL from the search results, and change the "X" to "1". Clearly, this is not easy (or possible) to do if the URL is a query string with an unintuitive article ID. Ultimately, I think that clean URLs are about SEO, but I think they can have a usability factor, again, in some cases and well, for "power users" at least. I probably should have said "power users" instead of "users" in my original post.

romaniv 15y ago

An intuitive way to navigate the site's content. This assumes the user knows the correct product name and the rules you use to normalize it (ariel-atom vs arie+atom vs ariel_atom). This not the case for most URLs. I don't remember the exact title for each article in some blog. In fact, I'm more likely to remember http://example.com/?Article.view.1 http://example.com/?Article.view.1 than http://example.com/articles/2010/01/02/This_is_my_article_s_title http://example.com/articles/2010/01/02/This_is_my_article_s_... Please note the underscore between 'e' and 's'. Websites usually normalize their titles when putting them into URLs, and they don't just URL-encode them, because URL encoding looks bad. They use arbitrary normalization and shortening rules. Also, why would the user navigate via URLs instead of using website's UI? I think URLs should be reasonably short and have no junk, but I also think that the whole "put-words-into-urls" movement is driven mostly by SEO considerations that have nothing to do with user experience.