Since the theme of this blog last week was search while I attended the ILM:07 conference (see posts from Wednesday and Thursday), I thought I'd keep it going one more day with this: Aaron Goldman posted some of his rules for URLs on his MediaPost blog.
The rules come from his obsession (he admits to this!) with URLs, and he finally launched GoodURLBadURL.com to show examples. Goldman is generally against slashes, underscores and hyphens in URLs. He thinks domain names should be short, make sense and stick with .com or .net (and avoid .biz and other relatively new enders).
On the search side, Goldman said, when Web users search for your Web site, it's important that the URL comes up in an easy-to-read format, using either bold or smartly placed capital letters (i.e. at the start of each recognizable word in the URL).
Learn more of Goldman's rules here and visit GoodURLBadURL.com for a laugh.
On a related note, I included this WashingtonPost.com article in today's Online Publishing Update: It appears more companies are registering defensive domains to limit the effects of online brand haters.