Can an “SEO Friendly” url contain a unique ID?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Use something like modrewrite to parse URLs before they reach your server. So you could convert a slug like http://oorl.com/99942/My-Friendly-Text-For-Search-Engines/ into http://oorl.com/lookup.php?id=99942. This will also let you change slug and keywords used to optimize certain links without damaging functionality.

Answer 5

Yes, and in fact it's more SEO friendly to include a number in your url as it implies to google that you are consistently updating your content.

I am fairly sure that it makes it much more difficult to get indexed in Google News if you don't have an incrementing number attached in some way to your URLs.

Answer 6

Be careful with allowing a page to render using the same method as Stack overflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems

Black hats can this to cause duplicate content penalty for long tail competitors (trust me).

Here are two things you can do to protect yourself from this.

• HTTP 301 redirect any inbound display url that matches your ID but doesn't match the text to the correct text.

Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/random-text-can-cause-problems 301 -> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id

• Use canonical URLs.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/820493/can-an-seo-friendly-url-contain-a-unique-id" />