If you type “brainwashing” into Wikipedia’s search box, you’re forwarded to an article about “mind control” - mysite/Brainwashing > mysite/Mind_Control
Why do they do this? Does the Brainwashing page also get indexed by search engines, giving them more publicity? Or are they simply afraid some visitor might manually type in the URL mysite/Brainwashing and be left high and dry?
I’m working on a project that will include pages focusing on a variety of national, provincial and state emblems. Figuring out how to form the URL’s has become surprisingly confusing.
The first problem is that most nations have coats of arms, but some have “seals” instead. In fact, Google lists at least three categories - coats of arms, seals and emblems. Sometimes, they have links to a country’s “coat of arms,” but it leads you to page describing its “emblem.”
The other problem is that not all nations are nations. So if I’m discussing a territory or dependency, I might the URL to read french-polynesia-official-flag instead of french-polynesia-national-flag. Similarly, Alberta, Canada has a PROVINCIAL flag, while the Yukon Territory has a TERRITORIAL flag.
So I’m thinking of adopting the following scheme:
mysite/canada-flag
mysite/alberta-flag
mysite/yukon-territory-flag
mysite/germany-emblem
mysite/guam-emblem
That gives me a series of simple, standardized URL’s. Then I could create a parallel series of slugs with more detailed URL’s:
mysite/canada-national-flag
mysite/alberta-provincial-flag
mysite/yukon-territory-flag
mysite/germany-coat-of-arms
mysite/guam-official-seal
If someone types mysite/germany-coat-of-arms into their browser, they would be forwarded to mysite/germany-emblem. The search engines would hopefully index both series of URL’s, which could also have unique metadata associated with them.
Does this sound like sensible scheme? Do you have any suggestions for improving it?
Thanks.