Can an “SEO Friendly” url contain a unique ID?

Question

I\'d like to start using \"SEO Friendly Urls\" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text \"ids\" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to

Answer 1

You are making a devils bargan here, you are trading away business goals for technology goals.

If you were to ask "From a purely business and SEO prospective, is it better to include unique IDs in the URL or not?"; the answer would clearly be to not use them.

The question then becomes, if you do use them, how much does it hurt you in the search engines? The answer is that it definately has some negative impact. How much is yet to be determined.

In terms of "user friendly", no, they are definitely not user friendly.

In terms of Google, they state "Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters." See their URL structure document.