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LibGuides 2 Guidelines at QUL

About Friendly URLs

By default, LibGuides assigns a random string of characters to each page of your guides (e.g. http://guides.library.queensu.ca/content.php?pid=669088&sid=5540092 ). We would like to avoid using these URLs and use what LibGuides calls Friendly URLs instead. Essentially, a friendly URL is a human-readable URL. It is important to use them for a few reasons:

  1. It avoids namespace conflicts (i.e. two or more guides or guide pages having the same URL)
  2. It helps your guide to be properly indexed by search engines
  3. It allows us to better use Google Analytics to see usage statistics
  4. It allows for self-descriptive links in places where full URLs are shown

 

How Do I Assign a Friendly URL?

Taken from the SpringShare documentation:

Guides

Click the edit icon next to the URL field, and enter your friendly URL:

Pages

Click the edit icon next to the Page URL field, and enter your friendly URL:

Please note, this is much improved in LG2, but you still need to manually assign a friendly URL to your guide's starting page (Overview, etc.).

When assigning a friendly URL please:

  1. use all lowercase
  2. use-hyphens-to-separate-keywords-like-this

What Makes a Good URL?

The three basic rules to choosing a quality URL are:

  1. Use keywords
  2. Use hyphens to separate keywords (not underscores)
  3. Keep it short

Keywords are very important as the words used in the URL have a high SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking. In other words, the keywords used in the URL will help users find your pages in Google, etc.

The reason to use hyphens (-)  instead on underscores (_) is because search engines treat the hyphens as a word separater, but not underscores. 

As a rule of thumb, keep the URL as short as possible but don't sacrifice the keywords for this reason; try to find a good balance between these two factors. 

Sources