What makes a “friendly URL”?

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 r

Answer 1

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.

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.

Answer 3

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

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/what-makes-a-friendly-url

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 --

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/omg-goatse-bought-by-bill-gates

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.