What are friendly Urls?

Question

• What are friendly Urls?
• What is its purpose?
• When it is recommended to use friendly Urls instead of regular Urls?
• Involves some relationship with performance?

Answer 1

Definition

Sane Urls or Uris easier to read. They adopt the commonly used folder structure to indicate about the content, including the parameters used to get to that specific content.

It is the opposite of normal access to parameterized content that uses its own parameter-passing mechanisms, usually working with identifier codes. The URL becomes more "dirty" and does not identify the content.

Purpose

Has several purposes.

Abstraction

This technique hides the details of implementation and normalizes the way to access. As it is common to use a REST technique it is easier for the more technical user to adapt the URL to access another content you want. That’s not so easy either. The most experienced users of this site to a greater or lesser degree know how to do this, but almost all of the other users do not know, and look who are very technical users.

It is a technique of abstraction. If the actual implementation is never exposed to users, the developer can change the internal way of manipulating Urls without affecting the external functioning of the site. This is probably the most important reason for this technique. The rest is secondary.

Security

There can be safety gains doing this. But not only because applying the technique is all secure, need others together.

Shortening, redirecting and normalization

This is done with a technique of URL redirection on the web server or in the application itself (which many people do not know, and which can give more control).

It is often used to shorten the URL.

Other times it’s a form of normalize the address consistently.

Another technique is address persistence using PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator).

Semantics and legibility

Deep down it’s a URL that has more semantics. And then the URL can get even bigger.

User-friendly URL is easier to read by the human who better identifies what is there. In general it describes the content with words in opposition, or with addition, to an access code.

Look up there in your browser now. It has a user-friendly URL. It has the question ID and its title simplified. You can hit your eye there and know what this browser tab is about without seeing its contents.

It can help in a variety of ways, including getting a sense of what it’s all about before clicking when it gets the URL from somewhere. When it’s on Bookmark including the browser autocomplete.

Obviously, if the user has to type in every semantic URL, it can become a burden. And there are websites that require it. Others make the short form optional.

It’s easier to identify content in logs access.

A lot easier, no?

Slug

This descriptive portion cited above is usually called Slug.

But you have to be a little careful because the title (or other information that is used to give more semantics) is not stable information. Use techniques to exchange content and maintain consistent access to old assets.

SEO

It can also help SEO as well. It gives extra information for search engines to index content. Not that it helps so much.

When to use

You have to use when you have mastered the subject. Like everything, if you’re going to screw up, don’t do it. Go on the rice with beans that earns more.

Don’t expect a revolution to use. In general programmers use it because everyone uses it, because they have heard it’s good or because they think it’s cute. Of course there is some advantage, but most do not know why. And why can vary according to the type of project.

Otherwise the use should be when you need to facilitate access and abstract the real address of the resource to be accessed.

Like everything else, there are advantages and disadvantages. I see a lot of site that doesn’t use the right technique and has more problems than solutions, ie create even less friendly Urls.

Performance

Their performance is usually slightly worse, after all it needs to make a conversion to the "correct" URL, but in fact imperceptible, it is an irrelevant difference in most cases.

Examples:

http://example.com/index.php?page=consulting/marketing => http://example.com/consulting/marketing
http://example.com/products?category=2&pid=25 => http://example.com/products/2/25
http://answall.com?qid=128341 => /questions/128341/o-que-são-urls-amigáveis

Interesting article on the subject. If everyone read, it would make much less shaving with this.

Answer 2

A user-friendly url is one that is perceptible by humans and contains a description of the content it serves.

An unfriendly url would be like this, for example:

meusite.com/23376453

A friendly url would be

meusite.com/receitas-de-cozinha-japonesa

Now both can serve the same content, but the second example is more semantic, better in terms of SEO because it has important words to describe the content; and perceptible to humans. While the first example tells me nothing, nor does it allow me to guess anything about its content.

The unfriendly url was common at the beginning of the web, at the beginning of the CMS, where the content was managed by a database and each page had an ID, ID that was used in the url. Nowadays a lot of importance is given, for reasons already described to the readability.

In terms of performance it is indifferent. In relation to the question "When it is recommended to use Urls that are friendly to normal Urls?" I would say friendly urls sane normal urls. Only in specific cases of product numbers or offline applications do I use numeric, unfriendly urls.

Answer 3

What is URL friendly?

The user-friendly URL is an easier URL to understand, both for search engines and for those accessing your site.

For a URL to be friendly, we must understand what the page is about as soon as we look at it.

This would be an example of a good URL:

Resultsdigital.com.br/work with us/

Already this does not make clear about what the page is about, passing an unprofessional idea. Most likely it will end up repelling the user:

resultadosdigitais.com.br/j4378478fhx/

Why friendly URL is important?

Just as a website could be accessed by your IP address and the domain helps you to be more commercial and user-friendly, I believe the user-friendly Urls help you to better understand the page you are accessing and feel itare more confident about the content presented, as well as making a purchase.

This does not apply to all users, as many of them do not usually give importance to the URL. But many do care.

See some examples of friendly Urls:

http://www.dominio.com/diretorio/nome-do-arquivo.html

http://www.dominio.com/nome-do-arquivo.html

http://www.dominio.com/diretorio/nome-da-pagina/

http://www.dominio.com/nome-da-pagina/

http://www.dominio.com/diretorio/sub-diretorio/nome-da-pagina/

etc..

Great advantage in using Friendly URL?

The Great Advantage of Friendly Urls is that they help avoid the infamous and feared duplicate content, which can greatly reduce the potential of a website, because Google’s robot instead of indexing and updating the proper pages, is indexed dynamic pages that in the background are equal to all other.

This is because many dynamic sites often add a parameter (e.g., & gender=male filter) to existing Urls, even though the URL already has this filter and the Google robot indexes them, because it doesn’t understand that these Urls are not at the bottom of the same page.

You can avoid duplicate content by implementing the Canonical tag.