What is the best practice to have a number in the clean URL or not?

Question

I'm confusing to choose my clean URL format for better SEO. Here are my two options:

1. example.com/apple
2. example.com/123/apple

The first format is very clean. It would be much more familiar and easier to read for search engine users. But I need to query the content from db using slug - "apple" in this case.

The second format uses a numeric ID of the content from db - "123" for the title "apple". It would be less familiar to users. But I can query the content from db using ID. This will make more efficient from the speed perspective.

The StackExchange questions use the second format like

stackexchange.com/questions/123/question-title-slug-here

But it has the very good SEO. I notice Google crawls questions fastly and they are listed in the first SERP in a very few hours.

Both SEO and speed is important for my site. Please suggest me what is the best option.

Answer 1

Remember, there's ALOT more to seo than the URL. If you have 'apple' in there and it's a relative term, great, you have a SEO friendly URL in my opinion.

Ideally, your whole URL would be relevant.

What does '123' correspond too? It might be worth displaying what it references (for example 'foods') in the URL instead of the number, but ONLY if it is of relevance to your page (e.g. if your page mentions foods, links to a foods page, etc.

As a rule of thumb, make your URL SEO friendly but not at the cost of its relevance to your page.

Answer 2

No doubt /apple is better than /apple-123 or any variations.

When you have /apple in your URL, you are saying your page is 100% relevant to apple. When you have /apple/123, you are saying apple is only 50% relevant to your page. When bot engines search for "apple", your URL will certainly weight more when the bots decides who must appear first.

The drawback of having only /apple in the URL, as yourself has pointed out, it will increase your CPU usage. For sure is very faster for your db engine to look for an integer as primary key than search for any unique text indexed.

I have done it already before and, in my case, the gain with SEO was worth the CPU increase since I saw noticeable gain with the SEO.

Answer 3

URLs should be:

• short
• memorable
• type-able
• descriptive
• relevant to the content of the page

The number in the URL makes them longer, less memorable, and less type-able. It doesn't add to their descriptiveness nor relevance.

If you can make your URL have one, two, or three words; then I would recommend omitting the number. /blue-widets would be a great URL for a page about "blue widgets".

On the other hand, longer URLs have a tendency to break in ways that having a database ID helps with:

• URLs longer than 80 characters often get truncated in emails and by CMS systems such as forum software
• URLs that are based on the page title change every time the page title is altered
• URLs based on user entered data can often be not unique

IDs in the URL help in those cases by uniquely identifying content. The server can much more easily adapt when the URL is mangled or changed:

• Truncated URLs can be rebuilt as long as the ID is near the beginning of the URL and not in the portion at the end that got lopped off
• When page titles change, it is easy to redirect to the new URL when the ID is available as a lookup

On the technical side, when IDs are present in the URL, the server needs to implement some form of URL canonicalization. Otherwise the same content can be served from multiple versions of the URL. This might happen, for example, when the page title changes. This can cause duplicate content problems that hurt search engine rankings.

Answer 4

My suggestion is to use second type of URL example.com/123/apple.
The first reason is: It is not more much worst than first and it is enough memorable.
The second reason is: Site performance speed become more and more important metric for search engines and, of course, for users.