Address by sam.d
URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your Internet address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes daily all over the place as if URLs wouldn’t matter at all.
A bad URL means your website or page won’t be found, clicked, visited and linked or submitted to social media. Without proper URLs most of your other great web design, usability and SEO measures get wasted.
Thus I decided to show the top 10 URL design mistakes which I encounter most frequently and which are in many cases fatal for your findability:
- Session IDs: What’s that? Yeah, I ask you, what’s that: e967ef2d7f923aab20e10ddb4164a351 ? It’s a session ID. It’s different for every user so every user has a different address, it’s like inviting people to a party and giving them all a different address.
- Apostrophes and other special characters: %e2%80%93 – This is an apostrophe in a URL. You can’t submit this to StumbleUpon. If you do you end up with a broken link at best.
- Numbers instead of speaking URLs: Decide, 123 or angelina-jolie-naked, which URL speaks your language, which one you’ll rather click?
- Multiple URLs for one page: www.example.com, example.com, example.com/, example.com/index.php, example.com/index.php? all leading to one homepage? No you have 6 homepages and counting! Use a canonical URLs script (WordPress 2.5 already does by default)
- Too many parameters which also change randonmly. Ever tried to submit the New York Times to a social site? In many cases it’a a duplicate as http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1214553738-5Jvl01JfMCKLx5duMGRv9g&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=sloginhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html
and dozens of other combinations are possible. This is even worse than #4
- Only keywords in URL: Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs inasmuch as their posting become totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy
- Too many subdirectories or mimicked oney via URL rewrite: world/politics/asia/korea/local/ Huh? Do you know what I mean? If it’s that far down the hierarchy, why should I care at all? I want the frontpage news.
- Simply PHP crap: Do you use Joomla or Mambo CMS? Their standard URLs suck big time: option=com_content&view=article&id=72&Itemid=37 They suck for both Google and StumbleUpon, the 2 most important traffic sources nowadays. As a user I don’t want to look at such crap either.
- Finally date based URLs: 2008/06/27/ is fine but do you think I’ll click 2005/06/27/ ? No! I won’t. If you’re not into breaking news stop using the date as your most important first part of the URL.
- Changing URLs after publication: If you use a WordPress URL like mine
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere
and change it after publishing to sayhttp://seo2.0.onreact.com/10-ways-how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere
the users who’ll visit via Technorati, Google BlogSearch etc. will just encounter an error. You can prevent that by using post numbers and descriptive URLs in WordPress
My 10 URL design rules are quite simple:
- Make the URLs clean
- Make them simple
- Make a URL human and machine readable
- Use one URL per page
- No special characters besides a minus/hyphen “-” ideally
- Use slashes like real directories
- Enhance URLs with numbers but don’t rely on them
- Skip the date, it’s not the most important info
- Do not ever change URLs once set
- If you have to change URLs move them with a “301 permanently moved” redirect
So you see: Achieving findability by appropriate URL design is not rocket science, it’s more preventing stupid mistakes. For deciding which URL structure is best in WordPress (not mine!) check out his how-to article of mine: WordPress URL Design. Also make sure to follow these 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards.
Did I forget something? Tell me.
Related posts:
- Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
- SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
- Blog Suicide: Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog
- User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps
- 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
This thing has 35 Comments
I think the most stuff is obviously, but it can’t be said enough.
So, nice list that upgrades every little SEO cheat sheet. :)
If it’s so obvious why does the NYT fail at it? Why do I encounter these mistakes over and over each day? It’s obvious for SEO pros maybe, but far from all of it, for the rest of the world it’s not obvious at all.
Hm, bad SEO advisory maybe? Everyone publishing a website sooner or later deals with ”can i be googled“ and when you involve people that don’t have a clue on that then … bah, what do I care? NYT should know it better.
And no, I’m no SEO pro, wooh …
i’ll choose angelina-jolie-naked thanks!
Great post. .NET has the same issues with their URLs as PHP. Many a software developer needs to rethink (or start thinking of) URLs in their web sites.
Liking the new design Tad, nice and clean. Thumbs Up!
Yer nice re-design, very clean yet effective!
I hadnt really pondered these URL ideas before, great insight.
if the url is for anything in a series or as part of a set it should contain no numbers except at the end where its position in the series is defined the reason for this is that the firefox extention next please is very useful and that numbering system is the only system that works 100% + it makes it very easy for people who don’t use next please to tell whats what – i know thats rubbish wording but oh well ……….
SEO is just a bit of competition and all admins come at it differently and using different tools and CMS’s so the url results vary. Yes, its obvious, but no, URL’s where not all created equal. Throw alternate language in the mix, old cms constructs, bad programming and you get a non-level playing field, hopefully good for those who want to do this right and win at SEO.
You’re quite wrong about overly-short slugs, an oxymoron that, in any event, *is not the problem*; the fact that bloggers don’t even know what a slug is, and allow their software to use the full title punctuated by hyphens, is the problem.
I personally hate when people use dates in the URL. Personally I think its a waste of spaces and is useless information.
And I like what you said about spoken language instead of numbers. I run into that a lot. Stuff like /set1/image1.jpg and /set25/image006.jpg
Neither tell the user or the search engine anything about what they’re going to see.
Good post.
joomla and mambo have decent search engine friendly urls add-ons so you can turn /option=com_content&view=article&id=72&Itemid=37 into /angelina-jolie-naked/ :-)
Until I started getting involved in SEO I never considered any of this. In fact, someone once complemented me on my massive URLs with session IDs and GUIDs because he said that it looked complicated and so I must be earning my money!
Bu stepping back and looking at it like a normal human being – the URL can tell you so much and can be as important, or even more important, than the title. If I get to tinyurl preview and the URL looks dull then I won’t read the article.
Great tips Tad – keep up the excellent work on the blog!
these are all pretty basic, but certainly a good start
Sound advice!
Wordpress gets point number ten (changing a URL) correct automatically too, at least in version 2.5.
Good thing drupal has PathAuto to do clear URLs.
Dot Net Nuke is rubbish at URLs. zitgeek.aspx? etc. anyone?!
So what are we webdevelopers supposed to do on internationalized sites? You know, the ones in English, German and French? We got everything: nice, clean URLs and content negotiation so all users see the same URL but get it in their own language.
Should we rather use ugly internationalized URLs in the form /en/2008/google-files-for-bankruptcy/ and /de/2008/google-files-for-bankruptcy/? Does Google do content negotiation at all? I’ve been looking forever for information on this but haven’t found much to go on…
Thanks for any pointers.
ThnLnk (http://thnlnk.com/) takes care of some of these problems as a URL redirector, quasi-shortener. It allows you to “semantically” rename links–while preserving the domain name for authority.
For example:
http://thnlnk.com/blifaloo/How.to.detect.lies/212
Not a perfect solution, but helpful in some contexts in giving meaning to URLs.
(As for shortening, the shortest you’ll get is: http://thnlnk.com/blifaloo/6429 Again, at least preserves authority.)
This is really helpful!
You’d think these major news sites would WANT people to link to their pages, but they obviously don’t. Time after time, I find myself working to decipher the simplest form of the URL, just to link to their damn page.
I think you have mentioned the 10 most important factors to be considered when settinng up a new website. Good work!
Hyphen versus under score? Does it matter?
That’s a good point about the hyphen. Actually there’s been some debate about whether underscores also apply… the consensus seems to be that the engines are starting to recognize underscore, but to err on the side of caution, stick with the hyphen.
john and Paul: In fact Google officially recognizes underscores by now. Plus “+”, comma “,” and others get recognized too but if you don’t know what you do stick with hyphens.
These points cannot be emphasized too often and your post is an excellent expression of what’s important. You’ve got them all and made it clear and simple.
Of course most of them are important for search engines rather than human visitors, however the question of accented letters becomes a major point of confusion for human visitors. Will it be the accented version or the non-accented version if they’re trying to remember the URL? I always encourage folk to try to work with words that don’t include accents to avoid that dilemma.
great comments I’ve goofed up a few sites by making some of these mistakes in the past.
At times the worst part comes up when you already have your wordpress blog and changing soo many urls might need quite a few redirection. Why dont they give the
user this option of doing so during the time of installation.
These above resources are very good for anyone who starts their website.
so many way to mess up. potentially. I have made more than a few of these URL SEO mistakes.
I can’t believe you forgot the biggest one of all- URL’s that aren’t URL’s. In other words, if I cut and past the url of the page and send it to someone in an email, she doesn’t see the same page that I see. Even if the page came from a GET request. A LOT of php frameworks throw URL integrity out the window. and rails, and django.
I have known the rules, but I forget about the mistake:P. Anyways,what should I say about this article? Simple,easily understandable and content-rich.
yeah, I agree with all the points. I would just like to add one more thing. Its good to add a 404 custom error Page. This will, help you catch broken links and also let you visitors say inside the domain.
I don’t think people realize how important URLs are, but I guess their not very tech savy anyway. I’ve bookmarked your site …it seems to have a lot of useful info.
Amazing article, These are simple but most of us do such mistake. this article will surelly help in increasing my PR and visitors.
hey can any one please suggest me what to do,i m getting this page has too many urls for my blog-http://what-what.net
thnx in advance
please do reply
You’re right – the use of special character entities in post titles is really common. I wonder if Google has learnt to tune these out yet?
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