Why is just an ID in the URL path a bad idea for SEO?

Question

Why is it a bad idea to have a ID in the URL in terms of SEO? How does this URL http://example.com/user/1234 hurt SEO?

Can someone give me a practical e

Answer 1

It does have an effect of the click-through rate.

The url is presented in green below the search result - so if it contains relevant words the user might click your site and not another site.

Which would you rather click:

www.test.com/page.php?u=85583

OR

www.test.com/Solution-to-your-problem.php

As commented this effect may be achieved even with urls including an id.

In the olden days it search engines treated words in url with much respect and gave those pages extra credit and higher ranking. This effect has almost vanished. We are left with two other effects of readable urls:

• Clickthrough
• Linkbuilding: Easier for a human to copy such a url and after the link is copied it is often referred to with some of the slug words. The url with "Solution-to-your-problem" may have Solution to your problem inside the a tag also when people link to your page. This will influence your ranking.

A solution with id + slug might be the best solution and it fixes the problem of keeping track of slug changes. test.com/85583/solution-to-your-problem

But there are some rules to follow, you should do a 301 redirect if the slug is incorrect to prevent a lot of duplicate content pages. Spam/duplicate content detecting kicks in if you got a lot of similiar pages:

test.com/85583/solution-to-your-problem test.com/85583/solution-to-yar-problem test.com/85583/evil-competitor-spamming-you-haha

Including the id also requires your ids to be as short as possible, an url with a full guid might be confusing to the eye and prevent a good clickthrough:

test.com/0CD03822-4A35-11DE-BF38-3F9356D89593/solution-to-yar-problem

Remember that Google News even demanded that you had an id in your url to be included.