What are the pros and cons about having SEO URL? What are the pros and cons about having a regular numbered URL?
I want to know because user friendly URL aka SEO URL are being used a lot now.
I’ve always seen something like this
Tweeting, sharing, printing, re-typing - I frequently get frustrated with long, wordy URLs that need to be typed in full, which are hopeless if you are wanting to include them in any material that might be printed. I don’t like using third party shorteners because I think they look unprofessional and the reader then has no clue where the link will take them. At least if you can see what the domain is, you’ve got a better chance of knowing whether it’s likely to be of interest. And there are also times when you might not want to, or be able to, enforce unique page names - such as here on SPF!
Years ago, I created a website for a client who wanted SEO URIs and it’s been operating great for those years.
Personally, I loathe the query string using a numeric ID because that tells visitors (hackers) too much about how to target the website … not to mention the simple fact that visitors don’t know what they’re linking to.
Oh, the downside to SEO URIs is it that the client knows what characters are not acceptable in a URI AND that each article’s title must be unique (it’s enforced by the database).
ID’s are auto-incremented and are unique keys, too, but they convey nothing to the visitor except the name of your file handler, your language (PHP in your case) and the fact that the database is accessed by numeric IDs.
>>> [COLOR=#333333]Give me examples of both pros and cons about having both SEO and numbered URL.
I first started with numbered URLs before I converted the site to “meaningful titles”.
After the upgrade a considerable number of numeric backlinks were showing 404’s. Solution was to catch the numeric and 301 to the [/COLOR]“meaningful titles”.
Rather than build a massive .htaccess file (because it must be loaded and parsed multiple times for EVERY request), though, I’d use an ErrorDocument handler script to read the database for the ID and generate a redirection to the “meaningful title” (replacing spaces and other reserved/illegal characters) with a 301 status (that takes TWO PHP statements).
Thanks guys. This is very helpful. So there’s the fight between which one should be used.
Late last year, I was building myself a simple forum script and when I got to the pagination. I got it to work, but then I started seeing that SEO URLs were being used so I tried to convert my numerical URLs to SEO URLs and I found that my pagination wouldn’t work with the SEO URLs. So I decided to change the forum script entirely. I’m also using SEO for SEO usernames. The SEO usernames works fine.
I would like to know which type of URLs should I use for my simple forum if I was to go back and redo the whole thing to make it user friendly.
And then I basically just fetch the ID from http://localhost/forums/category/1/General-Discussions
The 1 being the id and General-Discussions is the category name. I replace spaces and special characters with dashes.
For numerical URLs, I do the typical fetch in PHP and no Apache.
I just want to know which one is more effective in the long run.