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

Answer 1

I recently changed my website url format from:

www.mywebsite.com/index.asp?view=display&postid=100

To

www.mywebsite.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-post

and noticed that click through rates to article increased about 300% after the change. It certainly helps the user decide if what they're thinking of clicking on is relevant, in terms of SEO purposes though I have to say I've seen little impact after the change

Answer 2

The reason most sites use it is probably SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Yahoo used to give a reasonable weighting to the presence of the search keyword in the URL itself, and it also helped in the Google result as well.

More recently the search engines have lowered the weighting given to keywords in the URL, likely because the technique is now more common on spam sites than legitimate. Keywords in the URL now have only a very minor impact on the search results, if at all.

As for stackoverflow itself, SEO might be a motivation (old habits die hard) or simply for usability.

Answer 3

Remove the formatting from your question, and you'll see part of the answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/

vs

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

With no markup, the second one is self-descriptive.

Answer 4

As already stated, the 'slug' helps people and the search engines...

Something worth noticing, is that in the source of the page there is a canonical url

This stops the page from being index multiple times.

Example:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls">

Answer 5

First off, it's SEO and user friendly, but in the case of the example (this site), it's not done well or correctly (as it is open to black hat tricks and rank poisoning by others, which would reflect badly on this site).

If

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

has the content, then

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/

and

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/any-other-bollix

should not be duplicates. They should actually automatically detect the link followed is not using the current text (as obviously the slug is defined by the question title and can be later edited) and they should redirect 301 automatically to

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

thus ensuring the "one piece of content to one URI" rule, and if the URI moves/changes, ensure the old bookmarks follow/move with it through 301 redirects (so intelligent browsers can update the bookmarks).

Answer 6

Ideally, the "slug" should be the only identifier needed. In practice, on dynamic sites such as this, you either have to have a unique numerical identifier or start appending/incrementing numbers to the "slug" like Digg does.