Particularly in emails? I’m curious, and while I’m a fan of cleaner, and short, urls, I can’t find any evidence to support my hunch. If you’re sending links via email, and the url is not hidden behind an href, do complicated looking urls get less clicks? I suspect they would, because users will ignore them if they look to complicated. A short URL can give useful scents regarding the destination.
Jakob Nielsen looked at URL’s as UI ten years ago. Do you think his advice still holds?
We found that searchers are particularly interested in the URL when they are assessing the credibility of a destination. If the URL looks like garbage, people are less likely to click on that search hit. On the other hand, if the URL looks like the page will address the user’s question, they are more likely to click.