Is having a descriptive URL needed to be a web 2.0 website?

Question

Our in-house built CMS system has the ability to have descriptive url (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/889312/descriptive-urls-vs-basic-urls) versus basic urls (http://test.com/index.php?id=34234) We want to know other than giving a little more feedback to crawlers out there, if will mean something else.

Do having this descriptive urls bring us other benefits?

Should we limit the size of the URL to certain amount of words?

Thanks for you time.

Answer 1

Descriptive URLS feature major SEO benefits, as search engines weigh the contents of the URL heavily.

Answer 2

There are many benefits to it. Not only do they work better for SEO, but they are often times hackable for your end-users.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php

That tells me pretty straight forward that I'm going to find questions tagged as "PHP." Without knowing any special rules, I could guess how to find the jQuery questions.

You will run into a limit on the amount of space you can squeeze into a url, but limit the urls to core-terms (like titles to an article, etc) and you'll be fine.

One suggestion is to use these types of urls, but have a fall-back plan. For instance, the url to this question is:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1347835/is-having-a-descriptive-url-needed-to-be-a-web-2-0-website/

The first parameter is 1347835, which is the question id. The second parameter is the question title. The title here is completely optional. It's not needed to access this page, but when you use it in links it increases the SEO for this page.

If you were to require the title be exact, that may cause more problems than you want. Make the SEO-content like this optional for loading the content itself. SO only requires the question-id, as I stated before.

Answer 3

There are several benefits to descriptive URIs:

• It can help with search engine optimization if they include relevant keywords
• URIs without query parameters can be cached for GET requests (query parameters prevent caching)
• They are descriptive to the user, so their location within the site is clearer to them. This is helpful if they save the link too, or give it to a friend. The web benefits from semantic content, and this is just another way to provide it.
• They may also be able to modify the URI directly, though this is a potential downside too.

It is generally good to keep the length under 256 characters due to legacy constraints, but today, the actual limit in practice is not well defined.