: What is the best practice to have a number in the clean URL or not? I'm confusing to choose my clean URL format for better SEO. Here are my two options: example.com/apple example.com/123/apple

@Gloria169

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.

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@Heady270

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.

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@Alves908

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.

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