As many of you know, I’m not a huge fan of LinkedIn. I mean, I don’t despise them as I do Yelp or even the BBB, but I put LinkedIn into the category of “weird, confusing, and challenging.”
So today I decided to point out the ugliness and non-SEO friendliness of LinkedIn’s permalinks. As a programmer, I get it. I am able to look at these parameters and pretty much figure out how the server rendered these URIs. As a person, I am scratching my head at how someone has not cleaned this mess up.
Log into LinkedIn for the first time, you get this.
https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/?trk=
Normally you get a clean “www.example.com” but LinkedIn just has to add garbage.
Let’s navigate on over to my company website:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/2585194?trk=tyah&trkInfo=idx%3A2-1-2%2CtarId%3A1422766368982%2Ctas%3Aelite+strategies
Quite the mystery again. Companies do have much cleaner URLs:
http://www.linkedin.com/company/elite-strategies
However that is not in the mix for LinkedIn.
Let’s browse for some jobs:
https://www.linkedin.com/job/home?trk=nav_responsive_sub_nav_jobs
Or browse the Moz user group:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostRecent=&gid=2976409&trk=my_groups-tile-flipgrp
Oh, let’s sign up for a premium account:
https://www.linkedin.com/premium/products?displayProducts=&trk=nav_responsive_sub_nav_upgrade
Edit my profile (just plain scary)
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?goback=.nas_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1
Forget SEO, this is so bad for UX
In this day in age, it is very common for folks to copy / paste URLs and send them via email, Skype, or (gasp) even copy them down on a piece of paper.
How on Earth does LinkedIn expect me to write this URL down:
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=203195684&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=DgzL&locale=en_US&trk=tyah2&trkInfo=idx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A1422766391393%2Ctas%3Ajulian+flynn
Yes, I am a savvy individual and I can find the friendly URL (after a lot of searching)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliantrueflynn
But again, in 2015 why isn’t this “fixed?”
I’ve written about a number of ridiculous “features” of LinkedIn over the years.
LinkedIn needs to get their shit together. They have an incredible user base and a great concept. Their front end absolutely sucks. It is so confusing and cumbersome. Every time I visit LinkedIn I am presented with a different experience, and more questions.
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