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Web Applications: The death of long URL's?

Answer 1

+3 A:

Great question.

If you have the skills and resources you can create your own shortener and make sure you 301 redirect from the short URL to the long, SEO friendly, URL. That way you get the best of both worlds.

So:

your brand name is not being "eaten" by bitly & friends
your URLs will continue to work when bitly & friends die
you are in control of your URLs, traffic and redirects
you get all the link juice from short to long because of the 301

cherouvim 2010-08-16 17:16:43

The trouble is that URL's are built for search engines - not users. So I assume that as time goes on and more social networks looks to share links (facebook, twitter, etc) having short simple URL's might go a long way in helping people to post your links since they don't look like long strings of trash anymore. Then again, at least long URL's explain what they are about.

Xeoncross 2010-08-16 18:43:56

Also, if my short URL's point to the long URL and a user lands on the long URL page - how do I get them to use the short form? What's to stop them from doing like they always do and just coping the full URL from the address bar before looking around for a shorter version?

Xeoncross 2010-08-16 18:47:20

You can't force them to use it but you can make your social buttons use the short URLs. An example is http://www.enet.gr/123456 which will take you to a longer URL and then have a look at where the twitter button points to. Theoretically having users link to both URLs shouldn't be a problem since the short will be 301ing to the long one.

cherouvim 2010-08-16 20:39:36

Good point, people who actually use the "tweet this" stuff will not have to worry about finding the short URL. However, by using both you still take a chance that a certain amount of your user base might post the full URL to a shortening service themselves because they don't use those share buttons. Question is - is the SEO from that group of users posting to bit.ly worth the loss so you can have long URL's?

Xeoncross 2010-08-16 20:53:14

In the end, short URL's don't describe content which I think is the most important thing. So I'm going to try short URL's and slug URL's.

Xeoncross 2010-08-20 02:04:31

You always need long and descriptive URLs such as /cars/honda/crx/2010. Nothing can beat that. The URLs you expose are there "forever" so they better contain information about the resource.

cherouvim 2010-08-20 04:51:17

Answer 2

A:

If you do that, you will encourage people to use shortenen URLs that do not use them today.

However if you forget this little problem, tweeter users will continue to use bit.ly (because there is some value in using bit.ly). But you don't care, because it's just tweeter... after all.

Keep your SEO friendly URLs and don't worry about bit.ly.

For your SEO efforts, it's VERY important that your URLs contain keywords related to your content.

Pierre 303 2010-08-16 17:36:25

As time goes on I really am starting to doubt the importance of anything your site claims to the search engine. meta tags, URL keywords, etc. It seems that 95% of your sites worth comes from the amount links to your pages (and their text) and the actual text on your site.

Xeoncross 2010-08-16 18:41:52

Yes the most important thing is popularity, but the calculation is also based on the URL and the words within the link.

Pierre 303 2010-08-16 19:52:42

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Web Applications: The death of long URL's?

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