Sphinn - URLs - Human-Friendly Or Robot-Friendly?

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URLs - Human-Friendly Or Robot-Friendly?

Went Hot: December 12, 2007 - 3:52 pm
Posted By: bwelford 572 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blog.cre8asite.net)
Category: Google Searching

Seth Godin is recommending human-friendly URLs today. That's the non-WWW version of the URL. However if you want Google traffic, you may prefer to go with the WWW version.

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from sza 571 days ago #

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I think there is one distinct advantage to using www. When you use your domain name in print, a www-d name (like www.example.com) will stand out as a domain name, while people who just quickly scan the text may not recognize example.com as being one.

It's like capitalization at the start of a sentence. It is not really necessary: the period tells you where one sentence ends and another starts. But it still helps in making sense of a chunk of text.

(At the end of the day, one can still redirect www to non-www, so non-www might be preferable altogether.)

from bwelford 571 days ago #

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My opinion is still largely influenced by how other people out there might choose to link to your website. If the majority tend to use the www version, then that's what may well be appearing 'out there'. Redirects are OK but I prefer not to rely on them.

from g1smd 571 days ago #

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There is no problem in printing just domain.com in advertising, and just typing domain.com into the browser, just as long as the site has a 301 redirect to the www version of the URL in place.

I type "google.com" when I want to search, but the browser address bar doesn't actually show that URL at all when I visit their site. That behaviour is fine.

from Gamermk 571 days ago #

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Always do what's best for the humans because that's the long-term goal of search engines.

from davnoel 571 days ago #

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I would think that every website's "end-goal" should be to arrive at a standing with as many customers as the standing that Google has achieved with me. I don't link to Google through a list of favorites, and obviously not through a search.

It's one of very few "type-ins" that are just programmed in. google.com, google.com, google.com

Every time, that's how I get there.

The only reasons I can fathom why they haven't dropped the www, is that either they think it looks better, or they're feeding their ego as an ambassador of the whole world wide web itself.

Which they pretty much are. ;-)

from jonhenshaw 571 days ago #

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If you're concerned about humans, then use a short URL redirect system. Because the only humans we're talking about that need human-friendly URLs are the ones typing them in manually from a print publication. Because on the Internet, links are links are links...and it doesn't matter what they look like to a human.

from TheRealTerry 571 days ago #

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I'd love to drop using www myself, because to ME it would be more human friendly, but I approach it from a tech/branding/dev mindset like many here. Unfortunately, for the majority of people that's not your audience. Think of it this way: Have you ever tried to get a client or other standard internet user to type in a subdomain.domain.com type address? 9 times out of 10 they had issues that ended up being them still trying to throw www in front of the subdomain. To many people www is not an optional parameter that will get redirected in most cases, but a required thing to type in that will break things if they don't. At least, that's what's in their head.

If you cover your bases with redirects you should have little problems, but be aware, people EXPECT the www.