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POWhat makes a "friendly URL"?
 

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  1. POWhat makes a "friendly URL"?
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    <p>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 really even care (up to a certain point). Illustration:</p> <p>The following is an example of a URL that would be held up by the majority of current web developers as "friendly":</p> <blockquote> <p>www.myblog.com/posts/123/this-is-the-name-of-my-blog-post</p> </blockquote> <p>Whereas this would be considered "unfriendly" (i.e. bad, Neanderthal, ignorant, stupid):</p> <blockquote> <p>www.myblog.com/posts.aspx?id=123</p> </blockquote> <p>My questions:</p> <ul> <li>Doesn't the "friendly" URL contain duplicate identifying information about the blog post in question? In other words, once you have the id (123) of the post, why do you need the title? Wouldn't this be a violation of the "don't repeat yourself" mantra?</li> <li>What difference does the form of a URL make as far as users are concerned? Do users ever actually <strong>type</strong> full URLs by hand (other than the TLD, of course)? Do users ever look to the URL of a page to determine what the page is about? Why do we need the title of the blog post in the URL? Isn't that what the page's <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tag and content are for?</li> <li>I often hear SEO as a reason why the "friendly" URL form is preferred. Why does a search engine spider care about the URL? Aren't they just automated pieces of software that crawl pages (and the links to other pages that are contained within them)? If search engines were written like other software components (e.g. database access components), the URL would just be a meaningless identifier (similar to a rowguid in a relational database) to them. If I were designing a database schema with something like the "friendly" URL above as a table's primary key, I would (quite correctly) get chewed out.</li> </ul> <p>I said earlier "up to a point" because obviously, URLs can get out of hand. Here is an actual URL from Amazon.com that I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider "friendly":</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bissell-Kitchen-Housewares/b/ref=amb_link_5001972_17?ie=UTF8&amp;node=694500&amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=gp-center-5&amp;pf_rd_r=1ZXNJFE0CCFFDH4B9HGH&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=405478901&amp;pf_rd_i=510080" rel="noreferrer">http://www.amazon.com/Bissell-Kitchen-Housewares/b/ref=amb_link_5001972_17?ie=UTF8&amp;node=694500&amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=gp-center-5&amp;pf_rd_r=1ZXNJFE0CCFFDH4B9HGH&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=405478901&amp;pf_rd_i=510080</a></p> </blockquote>
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    1. USMatt Peterson
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    1. COThe first form (the one with the post title in the URL) has the additional disadvantage of changing the URL when the post title is edited. I notice all the time on SO that links I've clicked now are showing in the unclicked color because the question was edited. Annoying.
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    2. COSO uses the /id/this-is-the-title form of URLs, but the title part of the URL doesn't really make a difference. You can use any string after the id portion of the URL. Perhaps SO uses the title to make it easier for users to see what they're looking at, but does not take the title part of the URL into account to prevent broken links.
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    3. COvery cool question. +1
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      1. POWhat makes a "friendly URL"?
      1. USStefano Borini
 

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