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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

While we're talking about Posterous, does anyone know why it adds a random number to the end of article URLs, as in http://blog.dustincurtis.com/apparently-765 ? I know it's not a big deal, but I find that aesthetically unpleasing, as it kind of ruins an otherwise beautiful URL.

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Google's crawler (especially the blog and news ones) requires a three digit or larger number in the url. That is why you should keep a year/date in a url.

Update: Not sure why I got downvoted, but here is the reference from Google News:

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...

Don't downvote snewe, he/she is correct: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=...

I can't figure out why though. It sounds like an incredibly stupid rule.

Why do they want this?

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I guess nobody believed you, because it sounds so ridiculous. Do you have an idea why Google imposes that rule?

I'm not sure it's true. Do a quick search on Google news and click some links -- there are plenty of results that don't have numbers in the url.

From http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=...

this rule is waived with News sitemaps.

It might be a namespace thing? I have seen that too, and that is the only thing that comes to mind.

It is a namespace thing. I am pretty sure. When I use a title for my posterous posts that no one ever used before, the permalink is just the title. When I for example post something titled generally like "photo" it becomes "photo-73864"

So all post URLs share a single global namespace, regardless of ownership? That's not a very clever design IMO.

yep, looks like it.

if you check for example: http://posterous.com/explore You can see all pretty unique titles without a number appended and then a post titled "Tetris" gets "/tetris-194"

Even if you post something without a title it just gets an ID assigned which is (this is a guess tho) the unique ID in their database of all blogs.

This is changing soon! It's on our roadmap.

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