Short, near urls (Such as on this site) are a much talked about good practice in web development for the purpose of good SEO (and probably other reasons too).
If this is so, then how comes so many big sites like Amazon and Facebook still have ridiculously long URLs in their pages (like the about section, etc)?
Is there an engineering issue with implementing this functionality to a very large, live site? (I would assume so as it's best to plan and factor these sort of things in first).
Thanks
Because it's not a priority to them. Normal users don't care about URLs.
This site was built as an MVC app which has at its core, simple URLs.
My apps don't always have elegant URLs because my customers have never said, "I wish the URLs were shorter".
I agree with you that there is some value in a clean URL, but unless you start with it as a goal, it difficult to work in later and more difficult still to justify.
I had a bit of a rant about this a while back. Maybe it was a bit overboard, but I think I got my point across :)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/203278/are-clean-urls-a-backend-or-a-frontend-thing#203363
And because they were built, Amazon especially, at the Beginning Of Time; often those rules (like short URIs) came about because of the horrible examples of the pioneers. (Remember, it's the pioneers who get arrows in their backs.)
Having adopted the convention they have, though, it sure as hell isn't worth while for Amazon to change pretty much every line of code they have just to ge the minor advantage of better URIs.
I'd say this has a lot to do with the back button. You're typical user wants the back button to take them back to what they looked at last. Long complex URLs help bring this about in a reliable way. And really how often do users type in a URL that's longer than mydomain.com? I'd say rarely. Developers probably do it more often.
I think there's a simpler answer here. Bigger sites like Facebook and Amazon are big, and thus require more complicated URI schemas. After all, how many about pages do you think Amazon and Facebook have?
I suppose there's probably a way to simplify them from what they are now, but I would argue that clean URIs are more an added bonus than a goal in and of itself.
Many pages like Facebook are not meant to be searched via search engines or linked to friends. They are meant to be browsed. That really leaves little incentive to create the clean URIs as you describe.
In regards to Amazon, much of the URL isn't important. It's carrying around information about the user and the referring associate -- Things that a search engine spider probably won't have.
Also, Amazon & Facebook don't really want every book on their site indexed anyway. If you type the title of a book into Google, Amazon wants the top link to be that book's main description page --- not some user's Listmania page talking about it.
I would also guess that "good for SEO" reasoning has alot less weight with the big sites because ... they're big - they get the lions share of the traffic anyway. Amazon.com has all the SEO rank because there are so many other places that point to them.
Similar reasons apply to other large sites. MLB.com doesnt give a damn about SEO friendly URLs - if you're following the Yankees, you already know about the site, and most roads lead there anyway. Being the "official" or "biggest" site for something means a large amount of the SEO rank flows to you regardless of your URL choice because links on other sites will likely go to you anyway.
And as pointed out, they bigger sites are often older ones that carry alot of historical baggage, and migration to new urls can be a large amount of effort that is harder to justify.