FLETCHERJONESAUDI.COM/NORTHAVE.HTM

ALL CAPS and /Slashes can be tolerated but what comes after the slash here is unforgivable. North and Ave are 2 words that just don't go well smushed together (Nort Have?) and there's no reason to include .HTM. This URL is High-Total-Maintenance, let's hope their cars aren't!

HTTP://WWW.KNOPE2012.COM/IMAGESCMYK/CAMPAIGN/1239U/09230023/POSTER/.JPEG

Just say Knope to Bad URLs! Bet poor Leslie wished this domain got parked rather than (w)rec(k)ed.

facebook.com/siriusxmjamon

Great station. Bad URL. Like an extended jam, this URL wraps to second line. Never liked the character limits on Sirius XM. Always cuts off artist or title. Didn't even know wrapping was possible until I saw this. There has to be a way they can play with fonts or allow you to click to see full names.

Back to this URL, alllowercasedoesn't do it any favors. Too many weird letters. This URL is obscure as some of the bands they play.

www.chick-fil-aleadercast.com/atlanta

Here's another SkewURL (for the uninitiated, those are URLs spotted by URL-aholic Peter Askew of Search Bound) from Chick-Fil-A . Peter seems to eat there a lot!

This one is a mess of mashed up alllowercase and an ill-advised /slash. As Peter points, out it should've been Chick-Fil-A.com/LeadercastAtlanta or dropped Atlanta altogether and had a drop-down on the landing page.

As it stands, this URL is not chic. It's not ful-fil-ling. And it grades an F not an A.

http://bit.ly/dn5n10

Here's a tip when using bit.ly or other URL shorteners in print. Customize them! Too tough to tell the difference between zero and letter O and one and letter L. And this one ends with both. Oy vey! Thanks again to Brian Leiberman for the spot and reminding us that a little bit of extra effort goes a long way.

www.exercisetv.tv./fitness360

What is it with Ex-er-cise-tv-dot-tv? Not only is it a Bad URL but it has no concept of how to display itself. Not what you'd expect from a franchise devoted to improving one's appearance. Here, they not only present a mess of alllowercase preceded by Dubs and followed by a slash but theres an extra dot thrown in for good measure that makes this not even a functioning URL. Dot's not very nice.

iPhone/Droid/.com

Peter Askew, of SkewURL fame, captured this oddity that shows up in the final frame of a Coldwell Banker TV ad. It looks like an URL, it's placed like an URL (briefly at the end of the spot) but it's a NotURL. While I applaud Coldwell Banker for promoting its iPhone and Android apps along with its website (thankfully they stopped short of including all the URLs for their social media profiles) this treatment of the layout slashes the effectiveness.

FYI, Peter started a new domaining blog, Searchbound, that GUBU fans will enjoy.

minuterice.com/readytoserve

First time URL-spotter William Alvarez served up this one. Why do marketers insist on alllowercase and /slashes?!? If they used a subdomain and peppered in some Leading Caps, this URL would really stick, you know... like white on rice!

itunes .com/tv/the office

Peter Askew was on the ball with camera at the ready when this ill-fated URL appeared. Not sure what they were going for with the spacing. And putting everything after the root domain in orange only emphasizes what a clusterfreak it is. This URL has Michael Scott written all over it.

yeswehaveawebsite.com/CustomSvcs

Here's one submitted by Olivia McKinsey thru the GUBU Facebook Page. Sometimes I feel really bad for small businesses trying to make it on the world wide web. I can just picture how this one went down... "Sunnovagun, if one more person walks in asks me if we have a website!"

http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu

Worried about Swine Flu? Good luck remembering the website! By the way, how about the job those pig farmers did to recast the virus as H1N1?! Apparently, Joe Public actually thought that you could catch it by eating pork. Methinks my main man @saneel said it best with this tweet: "The 1 upside to swine flu is that now coughing immediately shuts-chatty-mcgee-plane-neighbor up. Thanks pigs."

summerpromotion.illinoislottery.com/lotmain.asp

Alichia Keller checks in again with another Bad URL spotting. URLs on Twitter raise some very interesting questions. On one hand, inserting the original URL (as opposed to a TinyURL) can be cumbersome and an eyesore in a 140 character microblog post. On the other hand, it can be important to reinforce your brand and gain SEO link juice by using the permanent URL showcasing your domain. No matter what you choose though, the http:// is critical if you want Twitter to hyperlink the text. Sadly, the Illinois Lottery strikes out on all fronts. There's nothing memorable here nor even a link to click. Clearly, no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Or, shall I say, they won't be cashing in with this URL. How about, the chances of anyone clicking this are 1 in a million. Or, perhaps, this URL is not the ticket to a successful promotion. OK, I'm done.

www.eiu.edu/~adulted

Just when you think you've seen it all, a truly one-of-a-kind Bad URL rears its ugly head -- or, in this case, it's ugly tilde. Props to Aaron Bynum who spotted this in the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette. As he pointed out, it's also a best practice not to use the word "adult" in your URL unless you're in the porn industry. This URL makes me say eww, not eiu.

www.websitebyus.com, path.to/domains, www.PresidentObamaAndFamily.com, www.UltimateBeAMomAndWorkPlan.com

Came across these four AdSense ads in my Gmail. Interesting hodgepodge...

The first gets lost in a sea of alllowercase.

The second reads like a sentence telling you that this website is the "path to domains." I like. The alllowercase works here as the punctuation breaks up the words.

The third one seems to be confusing the Government's bailout of GM with selling Obama URLs like they're cars -- financing and all!

And the last one is so looooong it cuts across the gmail frame onto my scroll bar.

Twitter.com/GoodURLBadURL

Good URL Bad URL is now on Twitter. Follow along for random URL-spottings and other related URL-ventures. And tweet any notable URLs you come across to @GoodURLBadURL. 140 characters should be enough to relay even the longest of Looooong URLs.

www.infoprint.com/transpromo

Why would the call to action on this online ad be "Visit us online at..."?!? Um, hello. We're already online. What, did you think might try to go to www.infoprint.com/transpromo using our fax machine??? And it's a good thing you included the www just in case I didn't want to click on the ad directly and decided to type in the full address into my browser.

USanFranOnline.com/WebMag

Here's a SkewURL that Peter sent in some time ago but slipped thru the cracks. Unfortunately, Leading Caps can't save this URL. It gets off to a bad start with the U next to the S which the eye is training to think United States. I read it as US an Fran Online thinking who is Fran and why are we with him/her online? And tacking on /WebMag makes an already too looooong URL even longer. As Peter said, "P-U."

tiaa-cref.org/ira8

Here's another example of a bad attempt at tracking response to TV ads. As if tiaa-cref.org wasn't an obscure enough URL, they had to tack on the slash to try and detect traffic from this particular commercial. This URL is not gr8.

Kaplan.edu/talent/offer3

I mean seriously. C'mon now. Who's gonna type in this entire string? While I commend Kaplan's intentions to track response from this TV spot, I sure hope they give attribution to any leads that came from direct navigation during the hours around each time this commercial aired. It's more than likely that viewers will just go to Kaplan.edu and assume they'll be able to find the info/offer from there. That is, unless they're really not talented.

cargill.com/creates

The only thing worse than an alllowercase URL buried at the bottom of the screen for the last 2 seconds of the ad is an alllowercase URL buried at the bottom of the screen for the last 2 seconds of the ad with a slash. All Cargill creates here is confusion.