Why do some websites add “Slugs” to the end of URLs? [closed]

Answer 1

I agree with other responses that any mis-typed slug should 301-redirect to the proper form. In other words, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/wh should redirect to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls . It has one other benefit that hasn't been mentioned--if you do not do a redirect to a canonical URL, it will appear that you have a near-infinite number of duplicate pages. Google hates duplicate content.

That said, you should really only care about the content ID and allow any input for the slug as long as you redirect. Why?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls

... Oops, the mail software cut off the end of the URL! No problem though because you still can roll with just https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427

The one big problem with this approach is if you derive the slug from the title of your content, how are you going to deal with non-ASCII, UTF-8 titles?

Answer 2

The term slug comes from the newspaper/publishing business. It's a short title that's used to identify a story in progress. People interested in URL semantics started using a short, abbreviated title in their URLs. It also pays off in SEO land, as keywords in URLs add importance to a page.

Ironically, lots of websites have started place a full serialized-with-hyphens version of the titles in their URLs for strictly SEO purposes, which means the term slug no longer quite applies. This also rankles semantic purists, as many implementations just tack this serialized version of the title at the end of their URLs.

Answer 3

Usability is one reason, if you receive that link in your e-mail, you know what to expect. SEO (search engine optimization) is another reason. Search engines such as google will rank your page higher for the keywords contained in the url

Answer 4

It's basically a more meaningful location for the resource. Using the ID is perfectly valid but it means more to machines than people.

Strictly speaking the ID shouldn't be needed if the slug is unique, you can more easily ensure unique slugs by scoping them inside dates.

ie:

/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls/

Basically this exploits the low likelihood of two identical slugs being in use on the same day. If there is a clash the general convention is to add a counter at the end of the slug but it's rare that you ever see these:

/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls/
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls-1/
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls-2/

A lot of slug algorithms also get rid of common words like "the" and "a" to assist in keeping the URL short. This scoped approach also makes it very straightforward to find all resources for a given day, month or year - you simply chop off segments.

Additionally, stackoverflow URLs are bad in the sense that they introduce an additional segment in order to feature the slug, which is a violation of the idea that each segment should represent descending a resource hierarchy.

Answer 5

The slugs make the URL more user-friendly and you know what to expect when you click a link. Search engines such as Google, rank the pages higher if the searchword is in the URL.

Answer 6

If you emailed someone a link wouldn't it make more sense to include a description by actually writing out a description rather than making the other person parse to the URL where the description exists, and try-to-read-a-bunch-of-hyphenated-words-stuck-together.