Quick question here:

as far as SEO is concerned is there a huge difference between the following 2 URL's:

1) Site-Reference.com/article/2323232/Article-title-here

and

2) Site-Reference.com/article/Article-title-here


this is for another site i'm working on and it would be quite a bit of work to restructure the system so that we could remove the File ID (in the above example the "2323232" number) - so want to gauge if you believe this would be worth it or not?

Well as long as the numerical parameters don't get too long, it shouldn't be a problem really.

While search engines do place some weight on names in the URL, it's usually more a consideration when folks link using it (ie; the words are in the link)

Anyway, as long as it doesn't get TOO long (aka not read by the engine)should be fine... just avoid

Site-Reference.com/article/2323232A34kj12398ASD90392/Article-title-here

Ya know? I have some pretty long URLs on my blog such as; www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm … at-11.html

And they get indexed and rank without any problems....

beauty! The numbers would be about 10 characters long (a bit longer than the ones in my example

Thanks!

In my opinion the URL's should be friendly and easily understandable to both Search engines and the users. A URL without the numeric characters will be better for both visitors as well as search engines, as visitors will find it easier to remember and can memorize that for long.

As said above as long as the url is not to long it should be fine.

Im sure G guide lines say a url thats not too long and relavent (something along them lines cant be asked to look lol)

In my opinion the second URL is better than the first one. Reasons being, Easily Understood by Viewers, and as it is short could be easily remembered. Even if you have numbers in your url. Its of no use to show numbers in the url and hence its better if it could be avoided. Though it will have no harm to SEO.

TheGypsy wrote:

Well as long as the numerical parameters don't get too long, it shouldn't be a problem really.

While search engines do place some weight on names in the URL, it's usually more a consideration when folks link using it (ie; the words are in the link)

That's right and i agree because it is the most advisable way in creating URL when it comes to SEO. Inserting some keywords is a great help in targeting those keywords in search engines because URL is the very first line that bots will crawl when it index a site.

Static URLs are known to be better than dynamic URLs because Search engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages much more slowly than that of static pages.

robs20 wrote:

Static URLs are known to be better than dynamic URLs because Search engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages much more slowly than that of static pages.

Do you have any evidence of this?
Can you cite reliable sources on the matter, written in the last few months?

While it used to be very common for people to believe such comments, the reality is that dynamic urls are quite happily spidered and indexed by google.

However, the googlebot, and other robots still cannot be as observant as a human, so keep thises things in mind when linking to dynamic URLs you want indexed

1 - keep seesion IDs out of URLs (stick them in the cookie)
2 - be consistent by keeping your variables in the same order to avoid producing duplicate content
3 - limit the number of variables to 2 or 3. If you need more, question your programming methods
4 - keep them human friendly, can you remember it without having to revise it?

Other ways are can be to Anglicise the URL, for example

site.com/?Show/Article/forPage/1234/forTitle/myTitle

this involves no rewrite as the server querysting variable should be available as Show/Article/forPage/1234/forTitle/myTitle, which can be split into files and variables in your code

I think the url should not too long and need contain keyword.

urls need to be search engine friendly so that search engine bots can crawl and index your site pages faster.Dynamic urls are to be avoided

seorider wrote:

Dynamic urls are to be avoided

Where does this non-sense come from? Have you read any of the previous posts in this thread? Can you quote some (recent) sources?

But suppose the folder names are long, in that case the article url length will get bigger. In that case will it not be a problem?