Comments on: SEF urls | More than just good looks.

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:10:34 +0000

Nice clean url structures have many advantages as well. They rank much better overall and they look professional. Nobody wants to look at a bunch of miscellaneous characters. It just looks and responds sloppy.

By: Brian Teeman

Brian Teeman — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:21:48 +0000

Mathias is definitely correct about SEF being security through obscurity. It’s very easy to test if a site is joomla or not with or without SEF urls. Sure SEF would mean that a url like com_eventlist would not appear in a google search but even then there are easier and better ways for a hacker to test for the presence of that extension. Site security is so much more than obscurity!!
Brian Teeman´s last blog ..Why is good content so important for my website?

By: Rick Blalock

Rick Blalock — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:12:01 +0000

Great point! So SEF stands for “Secure Everything First” URLs eh?

By: matt

matt — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:22:51 +0000

Thanks for the comment Mathias.
I am by no means suggesting this is a “be all and end all” to security. It is simply one more annoyance that could be a hindrance to the attacker. I was merely suggesting that SEO urls have multiple levels of usefulness.

We could probably debate all day if Google search gives a fart about pretty urls, but what it really comes down to is quality page content. When Google moves towards organic search instead of keyword search here soon, that will change everything.

By: Mathias

Mathias — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:07:09 +0000

What you’re describing is security by obscurity, which is about the weakest form of protection imaginable. Any self respecting hacker will find ways to design a signature of vulnerable sites and use that in google or other tools. Which in turn can be used by any script kiddie.

Brian is closest to the mark. Url’s are user interfaces, unique addresses to a specific location. Not only should they be memorable, ideally they should fit the site’s structure, which in turn will help a user with mental mapping.
Eg if an url is /people/john, I expect /people to give me a list of all people.

Finally, it is pretty proven that good url’s do help wioth SEO. Google gives greater priority to url’s that have a specific keyword, than to url’s that are just meaningless id’s. Google attempts to see websites as humans would, and humans prefer meaning over numbers.
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