It's been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO—the structure of domain names and URLs—and I think it's high time to revisit. But, an important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an "it would be great if we could," not an "if we don't do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well." Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.
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It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.
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Research from a 2014 RadiumOne study suggests that social sharing (which has positive, but usually indirect impacts on SEO) with shorter URLs that clearly communicate the site and content perform better than non-branded shorteners or long, unclear URL strings.
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There are exceptions, like those Google enables for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.
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