Question

I have an existing journal website with the following url structure

http://example.com/dbtable_id/ (eg. http://example.com/89348/) 

where 89348 is the primary key id of the journal article.

I want to add the title of the article to the url for SEO purposes like

http://example.com/dbtable_id/article-title (eg. http://example.com/89348/hello-world) 

I like this approach because I don’t need to change the PHP code since it will still look up the article by dbtable_id. All I have to do is append url friendly titles to relevant links in template files and add one more rule to a .htaccess file.

Is there anything I should be concerned about? Am I following best practices? Will the possibility for mismatch between ‘dbtable_id’ and ‘article-title’ affect SEO?

Answer 1

There are some that argue that shallow paths are better than deeper paths, but I don’t put too much stock in this. A semantic page with a screwed up URL will always do better than an unsemantic page with a ‘perfect’ URL.

So i say, go for it. As long as it doesn’t have any querystring parameters, you should be fine.