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Says I have a link, which contains the ID = 19963307

Type 1 : 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19963307/how-to-install-asp-net-mvc-5-on-a-server

Type 2 : 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-install-asp-net-mvc-5-on-a-server-19963307

Which one of the above links is better for SEO, or are they the same?

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From the SEO prospective, i bet there might be a difference:

  1. In you first example, the ID is separated from the title, making it clear to the crawler it is a different resource (as the / character does it naturally).
  2. In your second example, the ID is mixed with the title. It requires more brains from the crawler to determine the meaning of it.

Imagine the following case:

http://example.com/me-only-me/only-1-intelligent-person-for-each-11254879-9875

My title is 'Only 1 intelligent person for each 11.254.879', and the blog post has the ID 9875.

OK the machine could still know that your titles always end with -number, but it needs to learn this rule from your website. It is not certain that 'natural language' crawlers such as Google's might understand the right thing.

Talking about humans, it needs a little more time to understand the last part is only an ID... maybe only after having opened the post and compared its URI with the real title!

Thus, I would definitely go for option 1.

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  • your argument makes sense
    – NeedAnswers
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:33
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    i doubt it. the title will come from markup inside the page. the url is just a url.
    – Octopus
    Nov 5, 2014 at 20:01
  • Citation needed. Speculations are not very useful whether or not they're true, and there are quite a lot of them in SEO, the majority of which are just patently false
    – Lie Ryan
    Nov 5, 2014 at 22:03
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    You are free to contact Google and ask them about how their ranking algorithm works. You are also free to make an exhaustive study, asking each and every individual on Earth to confirm/infirm my hypothesis on their behavior. Once you have facts to prove my speculation right or wrong, you are welcome to share them here and I will edit my answer. In the meantime I will stick with it. Note the hypothesis markers such as 'maybe' or 'not certain': if someone needs certainty, (s)he will take good care of avoiding my answer.
    – Bernard Rosset
    Nov 5, 2014 at 23:29
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Putting the ID near the beginning of a URL is better than putting it near the end.

URLs often get truncated in emails or by CMS systems that show them to users. When the ID is at the end the truncation will often lop it off and cause 404 errors on your site. When it is near the beginning, your site can still redirect to the full URL.

When Googlebot finds these truncated URLs it will crawl them. Being able to redirect means that you will get fewer errors in your Google Webmaster Tools reports.

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For SEO, I would say an id doesn't permit to easy remember the URL for users. Therefore, no matter on which URL you choose; an id in the middle or at the end of an URL doesn't change anything regarding SEO.

However, an id in an URL can be very useful in case of you would have two pages with the same URL. This is the case for StackOverflow because the URL is generated by users in relation to the title of the asked question. In that case, the id permits to differentiate two pages with the same title.

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  • Hi thanks for the answer! But I think may be you didn't note that both the urls in my question contain the ID
    – NeedAnswers
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:09
  • Hi, I saw it after and I updated my answer ;-).
    – Zistoloen
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:16
  • Thansk, because today some one told me that google will split the keywords out of a url by slashs, so example.com/key/need-to-understand has 2 keywords : key and need-to-understand . Is he right?
    – NeedAnswers
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:20
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    Honestly I don't really know but I think it doesn't matter for SEO in any case.
    – Zistoloen
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:29
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    This answer sounds more like 'Using an ID is better than not using one'. That was not the question, was it? Both URI examples contain an ID, which will differentiate all URI using the same title anyway.
    – Bernard Rosset
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:50

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