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My name is URL

By Cameron Ferroni | October 15, 2007

One of the things that delights me about the Internet is when I come across a site that does a great job with URLs. Unfortunately, as the Web gets more and more diverse, and complicated this gets harder and harder to do. And the URLs go from being hard to remember, to impossible to recognize or type. And I hate that. Even more importantly, I hate problems that I can’t figure out how to solve, and this is one of them. Maybe I should take a step back, and help you understand what I mean. I’ll give you 3 examples from local and a little beyond. Have a look at Citysearch first - their structure is simple, but impossible to decode. Here is a link to a famous New York restaurant, the Rainbow Room:

http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/11411247/new_york_ny/rainbow _room.html

It’s not bad from a readability standpoint - you can tell what city you are in, and the name of the business - but you can’t remember it, or tell your friends to go their directly, thanks to that lovely code stuck in the middle. I think they changed this recently to add the new_york_ny and rainbow_room.html elements - they just used to have the unique code. I’m betting this was for SEO, since if you truncate those elements you still go to exactly the same page. Now let’s try Urbanspoon:

http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/3/38001/New-York/Midtown-West/Rainbow- Room.html

Similar, but they have 2 extra elements - the r & the 3, then the unique code, again, and then they are more specific about the neigborhood - great from readability, but again very hard to remember, and challenging - what if folks disagree on a neighborhood. Wikipedia has the best structure - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Room - but it breaks down quickly if there is more than one listing with the same name, then you have to go through a disambiguation page. And you can imagine for a truly local information site, you will have to deal with multiple listings with the same name (McDonald’s anyone?). So what is the right approach, and how do you choose?

Personally I think once you have the unique code doing the rest just for SEO benefit is unfortunate. I mean you have to do it, otherwise you are just putting yourself at a disadvantage, but the fact that the search engines basically require having the name in the URL to rank well is, well, unfortunate and extra work. I wish there was a taxonomy for city/neighborhood combinations that was well known and could be used as a standard - like the west_village example above - which does seem to work well in New York, but may be irrelevant/confusing in other places (Near Seattle for example I can never remember if Bridle Trails is in Kirkland, Redmond, Bellevue, or if it spans all three). And if you could agree on this then you still have the problem of worldwide, and disambiguation - imagine the URL:

www.mysite.com/country/state/city/neighborhood/businessname.html

Great from a readability perspective, SEO, and probably direct type-in discoverability, assuming people are willing to type that much, which they probably aren’t.

Which all takes me back to the beginning - I wish we could solve it in a complete, readable, memorable, SEO-friendly, typeable, and unique way but I just don’t think you can solve for all of those variables at once. Which is why it bums me out. Maybe I should just adopt one of the other standards and live with it, but I just can’t let go of the fact that maybe there is a better solution out there. Thoughts?

Topics: Local SEO, Local Search |

3 Responses to “My name is URL”

  1. Local SEO Guide Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    Cameron,

    Unfortunately I think this is why search engines are so popular. You want “West Village sushi”. Just type it in. No / needed.

    Andrew

  2. Teo Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 9:56 am

    So I noticed an article on slashdot where Amazon has a patent on strings at the end of URLS that seems related to your topic of discussion.

    Per SD:
    On Tuesday, Amazon search subsidiary A9.com was awarded U.S. patent no. 7,287,042 for ‘including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.’ In the Summary of the Invention, it’s explained that ‘a user wishing to search for ‘San Francisco Hotels’ may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.’

    http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/10/23/1250255.shtml

  3. Steve D Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 10:06 am

    I think the following patent might have some relevence…

    http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,287,042.PN.&OS=PN/7,287,042&RS=PN/7,287,042

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