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

Asked 2009-05-04T15:03:33.503
45

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://example.com/products/details?id=1000

To:

http://example.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!

url seo slug friendly-url human-readable
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3 Answers

15

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.

answered 2009-05-04T15:05:07.073
0

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.

answered 2009-05-04T19:05:57.087
-1

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.

answered 2009-09-18T01:02:15.663

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