What makes a "friendly URL"? [closed]

Question

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. Here is an actual URL from Amazon.com that I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider "friendly":

http://www.amazon.com/Bissell-Kitchen-Housewares/b/ref=amb_link_5001972_17?ie=UTF8&node=694500&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gp-center-5&pf_rd_r=1ZXNJFE0CCFFDH4B9HGH&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=405478901&pf_rd_i=510080

Turnstone

The first form (the one with the post title in the URL) has the additional disadvantage of changing the URL when the post title is edited. I notice all the time on SO that links I've clicked now are showing in the unclicked color because the question was edited. Annoying. – Defenestration

SO uses the /id/this-is-the-title form of URLs, but the title part of the URL doesn't really make a difference. You can use any string after the id portion of the URL. Perhaps SO uses the title to make it easier for users to see what they're looking at, but does not take the title part of the URL into account to prevent broken links. – Azikiwe

Answer 1

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.

Catlee

+1, and if I could vote it up again solely on the merits of your third bullet, I would (although the other two are dead-on). Well said. – Item

Putting the subject in the url doesn't mean it will break. If you are only using the ID of the item to retrieve, it doesn't matter what the rest of the URL is. – Phosphaturia

@Ryan: If you're using this "slug" scheme, and you ever change the title of a page -- and then change the URL to match -- all previous links to that page will now be broken. Or, don't, and the slug won't match. There's really no user-oriented benefit to putting the title of a page into the URL. – Catlee

"Forget about SEO"? I could not disagree more. Good URLs aren't good simply because they are short, they're good because they are unique and speak to the content of the page. This debate ENTIRELY depends on the context of your content and the typical user for that content. – Estimative

Did I ever say a URL naming scheme's value was based on how short it was? As you said, it's all about the content -- what's on the page, not what's in the URL. Putting a bunch of words in your URL will not get you any better SEO rankings if your content isn't good. – Catlee

The slug-part is often entirely discarded by software. You can usually replace it any random text you want - the only thing that really matters is the integer ID – Therapy

But given identical content on pages, a descriptive url often gives better scores. Given identical page content when searching for "gubble", many search engines would rate a URL of blah.com/gubble higher than blah.com/somethingIrrelevant – Shame

I really must disagree with this answer. As an experienced ecommerce "person" being responsible for getting many sites to rank #1 and make millions of dollars, friendly URLs do help tremendously. It lets a user see what the content is on the page before they click and inspired more confidence. This increases traffic and conversions. Second, it is good for auto completion in the address bar. Google also uses the URL to match keywords, just as much as they do the title tag, the meta description, and the page itself! It is a must for SEO and for users. Almost always go friendly - even Google says – Hans

Some valid points except where SEO is concerned... if you use ID to lookup the article you can change the title (and slug) and inbound links won't be affected... A good CMS for example will also automatically update htaccess to add redirects to the new slug name in case you want to have all the positive SEO weight from inbound links on a single URL, rather than distributed across different URLs for the same content... In addition, I often rollover links and check the URL (which contains a useful slug) to gain some insight as to what I'm about to click on before I do – Cnemis

This Berners-Lee article could have some value 15 years ago, now the article is obsolete and wrong. – Coalfield

Answer 2

To me, friendly URL means there's been some attempt to include semantic information in the URL to make it more fit for human consumption. It's an interesting example of a computer-computer interface being augmented and built upon to make a better human-computer interface.

So, in your two examples:

• www.myblog.com/posts/123/this-is-the-name-of-my-blog-post is friendly, because you've included the title in the URL - it tells you something about the page.
• www.myblog.com/posts.aspx?id=123 is unfriendly because it's cryptic and obscure: it makes perfect sense to a database, but none to you or me.

Friendly URLs are fantastic in some situations and useless in others. Basically, if a user is ever going to be exposed to it, I'd make friendly URL creation a priority, and it's not just a matter of aesthetics. It makes it much easier to get back to URLs from the address bar if you can quickly see and understand what the various options are, plus it makes it more obvious where you're about to go if you're following a link from a web page.

Combine all that with the awesome bar in Firefox 3+ (surely coming in other browsers too), and auto-complete in the address bar becomes incredibly powerful when you're dealing with friendly URLs.

Glossography

I agree, it is good for auto completion. Google also uses the URL to match keywords, just as much as they do the title tag, the meta description, and the page itself! – Hans

Answer 3

There seems to be a lot of conflicting information about precisely what effect querystring have on crawlers, but the consensus is that having more than a couple parameters harms your SEO because a long querystring variable indicates dynamic content, and so most search engines will be a lot less aggressive indexing your page.

Adding a slug to your url, such as this-is-the-name-of-my-blog-post from your example, also makes your links more different from one another than a simple id number, and adds more significant words into the url. These are all things that search engines look for.

Personally I find such urls much easier parse visually because there are fewer punctuation characters used, and the name-value pairs in the querystring can be very verbose and hard to remember.

Talent

I disagree. Google, Live Search and other high quality search engines DO NOT throw away the querystring. This whole SEO crap is gradually ending as the search engines come towards the site owners need and not vice-versa.. – Goniometer

Sorry, but huh? No search engine worth the using throws away the very querystring data required for returning a useful search result to the user. +1 Andrei: findability is as much (if not more) the job of the search engine as the developer. – Item

I am not aware of any engine that throws away the query string. I've heard Google used to ignore long values thinking they were session IDs, but the short values you've shown wouldn't be discarded at all. – Samite

It's true that modern search engines don't throw the querystring away, although having a lot of parameters is negative to your SEO. Edited to give a better example. – Talent

Answer 4

It's a good point about how your putting unnecessary information in the URL.

https://mcmap.net/q/119156/-what-makes-a-quot-friendly-url-quot-closed

Once the unique id 522466 is known - the rest is useless, so it purely serves to make the URL look "nice" and provide the user with an idea as to what the page links to. But this creates another problem. Most sites do not "verify" that part of the URL, so you could put --

https://mcmap.net/q/119156/-what-makes-a-quot-friendly-url-quot-closed

Yet it will still link to this post. You can see how this may cause more problems than they are worth because they could be used maliciously.

I feel Digg have taken the right approach to this. They do not use IDs in their URLs. Behind the scenes they get the ID from their database purely from the title given.

http://digg.com/linux_unix/I_Like_Linux_so_my_aunt_sends_me_this_for_Christmas

This, for me, is the perfect url. It gives me all the information I need to feel secure in clicking the link.

In fact, titles play such a huge role that, in the world of digg, people "blind digg" purely based on the fact that they like the title, or are interested in it. If your url looks interesting, you may very well be getting more traffic to your site. At the same time you will be making it more user friendly, prettier, and search engines will thank you. As far as I can see, friendly urls are win win for everyone.

Lucilla

This may break if the document title changes. – Matthaeus

@deamon. So do what Wordpress does when a post title changes: put in a redirect. – Sitdown

Problem when two posts have the same title. – Acrostic

Answer 5

My thoughts on your three bullets:

• I'd say that's not an optimal URL. I have no idea why one would show both the post identifier and title. I don't ever include post IDs in my URLs at all, only titles and (sometimes) dates
• For users, shorter is better.
• Search engines look at the url. Whether it makes sense or not, they do. Having keywords in the URL will offer some SEO benefit.

Athalia

I think people duplicate the ID and token/slug because they're lazy and its easier to parse out the ID and look it up than to create the token, store it and look it up. It also allows for you to have two pages with the same token if the ID is different. – Frias

Answer 6

I happen to agree with you, but shhh don't tell anyone.

It's just my humble opinion, but it seems silly to me that

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/

and

https://mcmap.net/q/119156/-what-makes-a-quot-friendly-url-quot-closed

are the same page. I mean, I can see that the hyphenated question title gives the URL some context, but it unless you know that part's optional the URL just gets longer unnecessarily.

Unpleasant

I think in this case, Stack Overflow is trying to handle two separate issues. One, they want SEO benefits, hence the MVC/RAILS-like URL. – Plastid

Two, they want a user friendly URL, hence the title in the URL. But if they key just on title, there's a significant chance the title will clobber with somebody else's title. Thus, they use both the ID and the title. – Plastid

I should clarify, I see the benefit of having the title in the URL for context. And I do see that just an ID is not a reader-friendly URL. But, even so, my own preference is for the cleanest, shortest URL I can have. Offenders: Google Maps, Sharepoint, ... – Unpleasant

I would argue that a readable, memorable URL is cleaner than number vomit. – Fortuitous

URLs that contain the page's title in a slug (like here on SO) aren't done for the user's benefit. No one is going to type that URL, or try to find a page based on a hyphenated URLization of a subject they think might exist. It's pure SEO-hackery, which doesn't matter nearly as much as backlinks. – Catlee

I completely disagree. Often times you read URL's in e-mails, IRC, chat, etc. and want to decide if it's worthy of your visit. This occurs often with news postings and blog posts. – Streak

You are certainly welcome to completely disagree. Sorry, not gonna bite. You and I are each entitled to our opinions. :) – Unpleasant

Answer 7

First off, they're friendly to search engine crawlers. Google and others put a high value on words in the url that match words on the page, so if the title of your blog post is in the URL, it will help your search engine juice.

Secondly, they're friendly to people who don't know what they're visiting. Which of the links that you used for comparison are you more likely to click on if it comes across your twitter/email/IM/etc?

Frias

Answer 8

Ahh...the trick is who the URL is friendly to. Search engines perceive the first url as more friendly because it apparently has content information in the URL and it doesn't look like the same page being repeated with a different parameter.

For instance, comparing

www.aTvShowSite.com/show.aspx?id=123
www.aTvShowSite.com/show.aspx?id=124

a robot will say okay, I don't know what these are...but they look like the same page to me.

Whereas comparing

www.aTvShowSite.com/shows/AmericanIdol
www.aTvShowSite.com/shows/Lost

makes them look like different pages (even though it may be the same aspx page serving them up), and robots tend to rank them higher.

EDIT: Additionally, it should be noted that many robots look at the text of the url to determine usefulness, so a search for "Lost" will likely hit the second type of url more than the first, even if the page content is identical.

Shame

Answer 9

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.

Eight

Another example of a programming principle which does not work for user interfaces: information hiding (such as encapsulation). In a good UI you should show all relevant information at once (which helps reduce mental load), and not hide it or show only a little pieces of the information at once. – Steere

Answer 10

The "unfriendly" URL you show exposes an implementation detail: what if, sometime in the future, you decide to drop ASP and to use something else? You would have to change all the URLs (baad!) or to employ a renaming scheme.

Having the title repeated in the URL is maybe not that necessary but it turns out handy when you do a lot of link pasting, to double check that you are linking to the correct place.

Penultimate

Answer 11

Our website uses so-called 'unfriendly' URLs, but we create special 'friendly' URLs for specific locations that members of the public use for specific functions, especially on printed material.

For example, our parking tickets have http://www.dnv.org/parking on them.

CP

Radioman

Answer 12

Well, for a start, try to keep characters apart from (a-z,A-Z,0-9) and of course :/._- out of the url. Not everyone has all of those on their keyboards (for example, I don't have & on my keyboard, neither do I have ~)

When for example, doing some url parsing or something alike, also helps if the url syntax is "clean"

Olympia

Answer 13

The 2nd URL looks more user friendly, whereas the first looks search-engine friendly.

Search engines give a higher relevance to words that appear in the URL. The domain name gets the highest (because it can't change), the rest of the URL gets a high priority because the length is limited, and then the body of the document is analysed.

My answer is quite subjective, because it depends on whether you are being human friendly (easy to type manually, or read to a friend) or whether you are being search engine friendly (boosting your ranking.)

Samite

Answer 14

In this situation, it doesn't really break the DRY principal, because as far as a search engine is concerned, '522466' is not the same thing as 'what-makes-a-friendly-url'

Generally for sites like StackOverflow, the token is the only piece of information that matters; usually you can put whatever you want after that point and it'll take you to the same place (ignored by the web server).

The page description is only there to help the search engines identify what the page is about (which is nice)

Towelling

Answer 15

Another point: people sometimes manually edit URLs, in order to go up the directory tree. So they might try to load a page like http://site.com/a/b, get a "Not found" error, and then try http://site.com/a or http://site.com. Of course, if your URLs aren't based on an actual directory tree, this may not work. But you can still try to support it.

Some browsers even encourage this, like IE with its error messages, and Safari with a menu that appears when you right-click the page title.

Formalism

Answer 16

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.

Clang

Answer 17

Thematically linked inner pages that logically work within each other. That is the best way to Silo a URL structure.

The best example, without using client websites would be to look at the BBC website, this has been done in best practice:

www.bbc.com/
www.bbc.com/news
www.bbc.com/news/world
www.bbc.com/news/world/australia

Inner pages have been correctly organised. This is best practice to tell the search engines how to move around the website.

Ratel

Answer 18

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.

Agnella

Answer 19

In my opinion, IDs and UUIDs should never be part of the URL, never.

1) Some NoSQL databases don't use IDs at all, they use UUIDs. UUIDs are long, portions are separated using dashes. Google will treat a dash like a words separator: that means your url will have 5 more useless keywords.

2) A human being does not understand IDs or UUIDs. A person understands words and talking URLs.

3) If the title changes you can simply make a redirect like WordPress does, like @TRiG pointed.

4) Finally, remember to use a date, so you can discern between two articles having the same title and posted in a different year, month or day. For example you can have two reviews (first edition and second edition) of the same book.

http://example.com/2013/02/11/data-mining-concepts-and-techniques

and

http://example.com/2011/05/23/data-mining-concepts-and-techniques

5) A date will also help any user to figure out if the content is recent or is not.

6) A date will add an important keyword to your URL: the year. Let's suppose I want see the most beautiful girls in the world, I will type in Google: "most beautiful girls in the world 2014". My url will be:

http://example.com/2014/07/10/the-most-beatiful-girls-in-the-world

7) Last but not least, Chrome caches the site you visited, so you can find the above site just typing in the address bar "girls".

Coalfield

Interesting points. My original stance (which I still largely hold) is that URLs are unique identifiers of web content and as such, the user (whether that's a person or search bot) shouldn't care about their format or "friendliness". For some reason, the web and browser community decided to make the URL the primary means for users to recognize content. My argument is that 1) the <title> makes more sense than the URL for this and 2) as a result, we litter our URLs with stuff that the server/database doesn't care about and then code around them. But obviously the web has decided against me. :) – Turnstone