New Webmasters > What Makes A Good Or Bad URL?

What Makes A Good Or Bad URL?

By corbyboy ⋅ July 27, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Choosing a good URL is important

One aspect of constructing a website that is often overlooked is the URL that is used. As well as it being a useful description of the contents of the page, in some search engines the search terms that are present in the URL are emboldened. Getting your URL highlighted in this way is an extra enticement for the searcher to click through to your website.

This article presents some ideas that not only make your URL less annoying, but make it technically superior, resulting in fewer 404 errors, and happier visitors.

Don’t go more directories deep than necessary

http://www.just-eat.co.uk/pages/frontpage.aspx

Is it really necessary to put the homepage of your website inside a sub-directory? When you access this website via the URL http://www.just-eat.co.uk you are actually redirected to the above mentioned page. This is surely unnecessary.

Other examples

http://www.premierleague.com/page/Home/0,,12306,00.html
http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html
http://www.gysd.net/home/index.html?width=1024

Don’t Rely On Uppercase Characters

By default, IIS servers treat URLs with capital letters the same as those without. This means that the following URL:

example.com/INDEX.html

is the same page as:

example.com/index.html

Apache servers will treat these URLs as different.

Take the example:

http://www.positive.org/Home/index.html

Accessing the following URL:

http://www.positive.org/home/index.html

will result in a page not found error. Relying on a URL to be entered with an uppercae character is not a good idea.

Make URLs readable by humans

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11095_3383688,00.html

While it is perfectly acceptable to put the date of publication or other such data in a URL, this example from Sky Sports is just a mess. Do you think your visitors would be able to write this down?

Compare the URL to this one from the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/7330235.stm

It is much more organised. Incidentally, these two URLs are both reporting on the same story.

Which is more effective and useable?

The following URL from the Movie 10,000 BC is also a very poor URL. All the zeros increase the chance the user will make a mistake when entering it. In this case, spelling it in words rather then numbers would probably be more effective, even if it resulted in a longer URL:

http://www.10000bcmovie.com/

Don’t spoil your URL with ugly session IDs

http://www.locata.org/(S(f0yd0paqhs5pp155qpoutz55))/Home.aspx

I cannot imagine why this website felt the need to design their website in a way that it used session IDs this way. The URLs are extremely ugly and you certainly wouldn’t be able to write it down. Interestingly, accessing the following URL will take you to the same page:

http://www.locata.org/Home.aspx

Where session IDs are necessary on this website is unclear.

Think about what your URL could mean

These URLs are all genuine, famous examples of people not thinking before they decide on a domain name.

WhorePresents.com rather than WhoRepresents.com
ExpertSexChange.com rather than ExpertsExchange.com
TheRapistFinder.com rather than TherapistFinder.com
MolestationNursery.com rather than MoleStationNursery.com

Always think about what your domain name means when you register it.

Can Users Bookmark or Forward every Page of your Website?

The website traintimes.org.uk is an excellent example of an accessible website. It presents train timetables in an easy to read and clear format. The most beautiful part of this website however, is the URL format it uses.

Most websites of this type use POST on all their forms. This means URLs cannot be bookmarked or forwarded. You are forced to go to the homepage and begin a new search each time. Traintimes.org.uk is different, however. Running a typical search results in a URL like this: