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Semantic URL


Semantic URLs, also sometimes referred to as clean URLs, RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively meaningful to non-expert users. Such URL schemes tend to reflect the conceptual structure of a collection of information and decouple the user interface from a server's internal representation of information. Other reasons for using clean URLs include search engine optimization (SEO), conforming to the representational state transfer (REST) style of software architecture, and ensuring that individual web resources remain consistently at the same URL. This makes the World Wide Web a more stable and useful system, and allows more durable and reliable bookmarking of web resources.

Semantic URLs also do not contain implementation details of the underlying web application. This carries the benefit of reducing the difficulty of changing the implementation of the resource at a later date. For example, many non-semantic URLs include the filename of a server-side script, such as example.php, example.asp or cgi-bin. If the underlying implementation of a resource is changed, such URLs would need to change along with it. Likewise, when URLs are non-semantic, if the site database is moved or restructured it has the potential to cause broken links, both internally and from external sites, the latter of which can lead to removal from search engine listings. The use of semantic URLs presents a consistent location for resources to user-agents regardless of internal structure. A further potential benefit to the use of semantic URLs is that the concealment of internal server or application information can improve the security of a system.


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