pageoneresults - 5:40 pm on Jul 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm slightly allergic to trailing slashes on URIs unless they map to a genuine physical directory.

Hmmm, I've had no allergic reactions so far. ;)

Otherwise you can get problems if your mod_rewrite rules don't take into account that you can get inbound links (eg. from Yahoo Search) without the trailing slash.

I think in this instance that Apache's Content Negotiation comes into play.

So I would consider the following: example.com/forums/116/83 or closer to root (FWIW): example.com/forum116/83 to be better solutions.

I would too if I knew the future didn't hold a possible horizontal growth to other primary categories like example.com/blogs/ and example.com/faqs/, example.com/articles/.

I've found over the years that it doesn't matter where the content resides. It's how the links are mapped to that content. It can be six levels deep and if there is a link to it from the home page or another primary category entrance page, it's going to be indexed as if it were sitting at the root. This is also all relative to the current PR of the site, it's age, the crawl routines of the spiders, etc. Think...

Harnessing and Funneling Link Juice

I admit that I am old-fashioned and I still favor a generic file extension (.htm or .html) which leaves no doubt at all - much like the URI of this thread.

I used to think the same way until I had to change the underlying technology of a site and deal with the intricate issues of regular expressions and pattern matching which your typical webmaster doesn't get involved with. I surely didn't want to lose all of those indexed .htm pages.

Blog style of URIs which end up being a long string of words separated by hyphens - which add nothing to the site usability and are just there for SEO.

Matt Cutt's Blog is a prime example of this. Personally I wouldn't go near a URI structure like that. And Matt could do whatever he wants to with his Blog as it won't really have any major impact. He could use underscores, hyphens, periods, whatever and with the sheer number of inbound links powering that blog, URI structure wouldn't be a major issue.

How many others do you think have followed in his footsteps? ;)

Do you think that user-generated content is usually better without keyword-rich URIs?

Most definitely!

What matters most? Brevity? Complexity? Clarity?

Brevity and clarity. Removing the complexity is the end goal.

Is there a conflict between usable URIs and SEO-friendly URIs?

What is an SEO-friendly URI? Is it a keyword laden, hyphenated structure? Or, is it a natural path that mimics the exact architecture of the site using brevity and clarity?

accessibility.example.com/83/

The above is a good example of brevity and clarity. The problem comes in when you have names that use two or three words. I typically prefer single word URI structures. I've moved away from using hyphens where possible and have done away with actual file extensions in most instances (the old fashioned way). I'm currently studying the implementation of Content Negotiation on my Windows Servers and will eventually migrate to that platform once I feel comfortable with it.