Comments on: Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites

By: Dhillon

Dhillon — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:36:51 +0000

Its always better to have a proper human readable URL rather than a query string. Though you want secure URLs but the more important is you want humans to access them and read. I have seen pages with so complex URLs that sometimes I just land on another product page while accessing them.

By: niksilver.com » An ABC of R2: U is for URLs

niksilver.com » An ABC of R2: U is for URLs — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:33:24 +0000

[...] are two obvious changes here. First, the obscure numbers have gone — a legacy of our old Vignette StoryServer software, and utterly useless to anyone who happens to be a human being. Second, we’ve [...]

By: byteme

byteme — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:39:59 +0000

there are those that say your should always hide the urls so it can’t be manipulated or critiqued

By: Ramenos - Le Top 10 des sites US avec de mauvaises URL - Référencement

Ramenos - Le Top 10 des sites US avec de mauvaises URL - Référencement — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:18:47 +0000

[...] url illisible pour un moteur ralentit (voire bloque) l’indexation d’un site internet. SEO Blog a listé un top 10 des sites anglophones dont la structure d’url est catastrophique. Je vous [...]

By: henrik

henrik — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:49:53 +0000

Glad and sad about this post. Glad you wrote it and sad ‘cos I’ve now got a small mountain of work to fix my – and a few clients’ – urls :)

By: onreact

onreact — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:01:16 +0000

Yeah Paul, exactly. That’s why I don’t read these posts at all after seeing the date. Otherwise I would read it first and then due to the date take the news with a grain of salt. I would read it though!

By: Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing

Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:28:33 +0000

Re: #9 — true, the date might not be the most sought after nugget of info. But in appreciation for the ever present battle between human eyeballs and the robots… yes, sometimes that date is useful. When reading an article about SEO, for instance, I often remind myself about how fast things change in the industry, and read the date before I read anything else. That way, if I see that the post is from 2006, I know to read it with a certain discerning eye.

So in that case, perhaps it’s a design failure from a robots point of view — but overall I think Wordpress is doing its human readers a favor.

By: URL Design - auch große Seiten bauen Mist | tekka.de

URL Design - auch große Seiten bauen Mist | tekka.de — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:29:05 +0000

[...] Design aus SEO-Sicht nicht perfekt. Dies wird in einem Post im SEO 2.0 Blog mit dem Titel “Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites” [...]

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:45:58 +0000

Fox news is just too cheap to upgrade from their ancient Vignette StoryServer 5.0. Those are old Vignette URL tags.

0,2933,308077,00.html

0 = cached page (1 is not cached)
2933 = template id #
308077 = database record number
00 = No browser variations (FF has browser variations)

Wanna have some fun – advance the third number to see fox stories directly – even ones that are “pre-launch” on occasion. Fox is proxied, but some other sites (like iVillage) will still bypass the cache if you change the first number, and give different layouts if you change the template id, etc

Of course, you have to be REALLY bored . . .

By: onreact

onreact — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:05:13 +0000

Alex: You are complaining. I am showing webmasters how they can avoid pitfalls of URL design. Are you the webmaster of Bloomberg? Therefore the grudge? I noticed that Bloomberg has partly removed the issues already.
On a side note, I'm a non-native speaker of English, it's my third language of 5 so I sometimes make mistakes especially in a hurry while blogging. What about your Polish, German, Spanish and French? Thanks for the tip in any case.