Should you use "pretty urls" if you don't care about SEO / SEM

Question

I am developing a hosted software application as a service, similar to the highly specialized version of 37Signal Highrise. In this context, where SEO is not an issue, is it worth using "pretty URLs" instead of going with numeric identifiers (like customers/john-smith instead of customers/1234 )? I notice that many web applications do not worry about them if they do not provide real value (for example, e-commerce applications, blogs - all that is needed to search SEO through search engines).

Answer 1

It is always worth it if you have the time to do it right.

• Friendly URLs look a lot nicer, and they give a better idea of ​​where the link will lead. This is useful if the link is split, for example. via instant message.
• If you are looking for a specific page from your browsing history, a user-friendly URL helps.
• A friendly URL is much easier to remember (useful in some cases).
• As said earlier, it is much easier to communicate verbally (necessary more often than you think).
• It hides unnecessary technical data from the user. In one case, when the user ID was visible in the URL, several users asked why their user ID was higher than the total number of users. No damage was done, but why do you have a confused user, if you can avoid it.

Answer 2

Depending on how often URLs are passed orally by its users. People tend to think it's relatively difficult to say something like

 http://www.domain.com/?id=4535&f=234&r=s%39fu__ 

And How

 http://www.domain.com/john-doe 

much better;)

Answer 3

In addition to readability, another thing to keep in mind is that by exposing an automatically increasing numeric key, you also allow someone to guess the URLs of other resources and provide some information about your data. For example, if someone subscribes to your application and sees that their account is located in /customer/12 , this may affect their confidence in your application, knowing that you only have 11 other customers. That would not be a problem if they had the URL /customer/some-company .

Answer 4

I am sure that I click on the link more often when I hover over it, and it is http://www.example.com/something-i-am-interested-in.html .

Instead of seeing http://www.example.com/23847ozjo8uflidsa.asp .

This is a rather annoying click on MSDN links because I never know what to expect from it.

Answer 5

When I create applications, I try to hide my structure from prying eyes - while it subjectively depends on how much “SEO” you get out of it. Pretty URLs tend to help people navigate and understand where they are, protecting their code from possible injections.

I notice that you are using a Rails application - so you probably won’t have such a large query string as in ASP, PHP or other languages, but, in my opinion, the added cleanliness and overall appearance are a plus for interacting with clients , When sharing links, it’s better that customers can copy the URL: customer / john_doe, than look for “link to me” or random / client /

Marco

Answer 6

I usually use a combination that simplifies the use of Rails RESTful routing, but at the same time provides additional information in the URLs.

My application urls look something like this: http://example.com/discussions/123-is-it-worth-using-pretty-urls/ http://example.com/discussions/123-is-it-worth -using-pretty-urls / comments http://example.com/discussions/123-is-it-worth-using-pretty-urls/comments/34567

You do not need to add ANY custom routes to remove this, you just need to add the following method to your model:

 def to_param [ id, permalink ].join("-") end 

And make sure that any call invocation parameters [: id] in your controller are converted to an integer by specifying the parameters [: id] .to_i.

Just notice, you will need to set the permalink attribute when your record is saved ...

Answer 7

If your application is calm, the URLs that the rails give you are SEO-friendly by default.

In your example, customers/1234 will probably return something like

 <h1>Customer</h1> <p><strong>Name:</strong> John Smith</p> etc etc 

Any current SEO spider will be smart enough to analyze the landing page and extract "John Smith" from it.

So, in this sense, customers/1234 already a “good” URL (unlike other systems in which the client would have something like resource/123123/1234 for client 1234 resource/23232/321 for client 321).

Now, if you want your users to regularly use URLs (for example, in delicious, etc.), you can start using logins and reading fields instead of identifiers.

But for SEO, identifiers are just perfect.