: Should an ID go at the beginning or end of the URL for SEO? 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

@Murray155

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


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).
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:
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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@Heady270

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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@YK1175434

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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