Can an "SEO Friendly" url contain a unique ID?

user_36695 0
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I'd like to start using "SEO Friendly Urls" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text "ids" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to simply looking up by an integer. Now, I know this isn't as "human friendly", but if I switched from

http://mysite.com/products/details?id=1000

to

http://mysite.com/products/spacelysprokets/sproket/id

I could still use the ID alone to quickly lookup the details, but the URL itself contains keywords that will display in that detail. Is that friendly enough for Google? I hope so as it seems a much easier process than generating something at the end that is both unique and meaningful.

Thanks!

James

seo friendly-url url
11 Answers
AviewAnew_84350

Have a look at the URLs that StackOverflow uses. They have a unique id, then they have the SEO-friendly stuff. You can omit the SEO-friendly stuff and the URL still works.

Paul_Tomblin_33330

You are making a devils bargan here, you are trading away business goals for technology goals.

If you were to ask "From a purely business and SEO prospective, is it better to include unique IDs in the URL or not?"; the answer would clearly be to not use them.

The question then becomes, if you do use them, how much does it hurt you in the search engines? The answer is that it definately has some negative impact. How much is yet to be determined.

In terms of "user friendly", no, they are definitely not user friendly.

In terms of Google, they state "Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters." See their URL structure document.

user_886310

I'm not aware of any problems caused by adding an ID to a URL. In fact it can be extremely useful, as it allows the human/search engine friendly part of the URL to be changed without causing a broken link to a page that a search engine has already indexed. Using SO as an example, here's a link to your question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/you-can-put-any-text-you-want-here

Nick_Crowther_140720

Nothing wrong with that. An increasing number of services have started to use a hybrid solution as Paul Tomblin already pointed out. In addition to SO, Tumblr uses this pattern too (maybe it was the first).

Furthermore, in certain services—like Google News—the URL must contain a unique numeric ID.

user_736030

Getting rid of the parameterized URL will definitely help. From my experience, including the ID does not hurt or help, as long as there are no '?key=value' pairs in the url.

user_856770
user_978660
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