In search of the perfect URL

#1

Post by owksley » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#2

Post by giancarlostoro » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 7:41 PM UTC

Interestingly enough I think I tried the same thing when I saw a link from the same site. It is indeed a great workaround to the changing URL's dilemma.

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#3

Post by ckluis » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 7:41 PM UTC

I like this solution.

Essentially qz.com/122345/{anything-here} will redirect to the canonical url allowing for experimentation on the title of articles and urls.

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#4

Post by X-Istence » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 7:45 PM UTC

Stack overflow does this too:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32672492/python-3-5-start...

Is the same as:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32672492/

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#5

Post by lwf » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

It also means you can trick people:

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Quantum-Computing-Module/dp/B001...

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#6

Post by ambirex » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

We have reversed it to be example.com/seo-go-nuts/%d/ to bring the text closer together.

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#7

Post by nmjohn » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

lwf wrote: post #5

It also means you can trick people: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Quantum-Computing-Module/dp/B001...

Amazons URL's are actually quite interesting -

    Original: 
        http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Programs-Engineering/dp/0262510871/

    Equivalent:
        http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262510871
        http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262510871/something-else
        http://www.amazon.com/something/dp/0262510871
        http://www.amazon.com/something/dp/0262510871/something-else

It appears so long as 'dp/0262510871' is in the url (without dp/# appearing before it, but a second one after is fine) it works.

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#8

Post by ademarre » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

lwf wrote: post #5

It also means you can trick people: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Quantum-Computing-Module/dp/B001...

You can trick people, and possibly even search engines. I've wondered if blackhat SEOs could abuse such URLs to discredit content on competitors' sites.

I believe it can be a negative signal when sites stuff too many keywords in their URLs, especially if those keywords aren't relevant to the page's content. A server accepting arbitrary URLs is in a way blindly sanctioning loaded URLs.

Granted, Google's algorithms are surely very sophisticated in this regard, but fighting web spam is hard.

Re: In search of the perfect URL

#9

Post by jjsewell-ff » Sat, Sep 19, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

When building content management systems, we've taken a approach similar to this to keep URLs constant when names of articles, posts, objects might get changed by an site admin. The first time I noticed this approach was Trello.

Here's an example trello URL: https://trello.com/x/1234567/203-make-the-buttons-bigger

If you change the name of the card, the ID (203) stays the same, but the friendly part of the URL stays the same. When directing you to the card, the system doesn't care past the ID.