URLS & SEO question

[cprats]

What's better for SEO, keeping the ID product number in the URL or using the thirty bees default configuration without ID product number?

[the.rampage.rado]

I would say google is smart enough now to not give a ...... about the ID in the URL. They know sometimes there should be a number. As nerd I know it too but it could be little strange for the noobs outthere so I would like it off if possible. One more thing is that way you can hide the number of products in your shop if you don't want to show this.

[lesley]

Honestly, a new shop I would not use ID's. If you are moving an existing shop, I would not change the URLS. I think the SEO benefit of not having them is very low and not worth the trouble of changing existing urls.

[innercode]

IDs in URLs has no impact on SEO. Your customers won't look at these IDs at all, check booking.com URLs :)

What happens if you hire SEO guy to fill the fields and texts and he/she modifies them? Probably 404 not found, and it will hurt your SEO a lot. It is possible to create module which tracks these changes, but usually modules that removes IDs don't do that. Also other problems might pop out, e.g. duplicate URLs, you need track that too. I saw one time when product URL matched category URL. Then you will need URLs tracking tool to check if you don't have duplicate URLs. So you stack up module on module (or extend current one) basically for a thing (removed IDs) which gives nothing.

Then you decide to have a blog, and guess what? :) it has IDs too.. it is not global change, modules that have pages, like blog, need modifications.

For small shop maybe it would be OK, but for a larger one with lots of categories and thousands of products you and your developer will have more work with possibility to break things up.

We've encountered it in 2 shops, both had problems from time to time due to these changes.