URL Design
I grew up in this industry learning how to game search engines (well, Google) to make money off my affiliate sales, so I’m no stranger to the practice of keyword stuffing URLs. It was fairly common to end up with a URL like this:
http://guitars.example.com/best-guitars/cheap-guitars/popular-guitarThat kind of URL used to be great for SEO purposes. Fortunately Google’s hurricane updates of 2003 eliminated any ranking benefit of these URLs. Unfortunately the professional SEO industry is centered around extortion and still might advise you stuff your URLs with as many keywords as you can think of. They’re wrong — ignore them.
Some additional points to keep in mind:
- Underscores are just bad. Stick to dashes.
- Use short, full, and commonly known words. If a section has a dash or special character in it, the word is probably too long.
URLs are for humans. Design them for humans.
Every advice in this article is great and should be followed. Yet I still have to see non-developer human being that is using the path part of the URL to navigate the site.
