I am at a confusion point when I try to figure out which URL would be more effective for SEO.

news/category/id/article-title/
news/category/id-article-title/
news/category/id-article-title.html
news/category/id/article-title.html

Which is the best for seo? The id must be inclusive because that's how it's identified, to state the obvious.

Also - how long can a URL be before it's rejected and has no SEO value?

None of them, all of them, any of them, pick which makes more sense from a site management point of view.

Also - how long can a URL be before it's rejected and has no SEO value?

any where from a single character to a lot.

the URL has very very little weight, look at it from a REAL users point of view.

Thanks for that however I still need both questions answering. I'm looking at it from a SEO point of view and I'm sure it'll be easier for REAL users as well.

Well, depending on whether you can get rid of the news subfolder, I'd go with:

category/id-article-title.html

I know this is what the guys over at vBSEO do, and I've had good success with their product.

This forum uses that format too.

It really really really DOES NOT matter!

to all intents and purposes all 4 you have there are identical for the absolutely minute boost it might just have.

You have already spent FAR too much time on such minutae

the URL of a page is NOT of major concern to search engines.

the URL of a page is NOT of major concern to search engines.

So why do forums with vbSEO installed consistently outperform forums without it in the rankings?

Clearly there is some weight added to the URL, no matter how small.

Because vbSEO does more than rewrite URLs.

In my personal experience URL has quite a large impact upon search rankings.

Well, depending on whether you can get rid of the news subfolder, I'd go with:

category/id-article-title.html

I know this is what the guys over at vBSEO do, and I've had good success with their product.

This forum uses that format too.

That's ideal, however I am using mod_rewrite and determine the news by /news

How would it determine other sections - perhaps I had one called tutorials? would it still be category/id-article-title.html ? I guess sites that use the category/id-article-title instead of section/category/id-article-title don't have other sections (or at least ones that need seo like that)

You might find these articles interesting/useful:

URL as UI -Jakob Nielson
URL as UI - Adam Darowski

In my personal experience URL has quite a large impact upon search rankings

But have you REALLY tested it properly?

I have pages on a couple of different sites with made up words in the URLs, made up words in the form of two real words concatenated, so it was testing for two myths at the same time.
These "words" appear absolutely nowhere else on the page or in my navigation anchor text or anywhere on the sites.

For one of these "words" there is TWO pages on the Internet, one has the word in the body text the other, mine, the word is ONLY in the URL.
Guess which page shows up in ALL three major search engines? ...

Yep, you are probably right. NOT MY PAGE!

The only search engine that only shows my page is Ask, yep Ask! which in all the years I have been looking after or running sites has sent less than 1% of visitors IN TOTAL and absolute 0 in buyers.

Yahoo! has my page listed but places it second.
Google and MSN the page doesn't show up at all for that "word". The page is indexed in both because it shows up in site: searches.

There is only one point where the URL has any value, and that is when used as the anchor text for a link to the same page.

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

You might find these articles interesting/useful:

URL as UI -Jakob Nielson
URL as UI - Adam Darowski

Shock Horror

* a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to spell
* short URLs
* easy-to-type URLs
* URLs that visualize the site structure
* URLs that are "hackable" to allow users to move to higher levels of the information architecture by hacking off the end of the URL
* persistent URLs that don't change

I agree with Jakob Neilson on something

or maybe ...

... Jakob Neilson agrees with me

The Adam Darowski article is good, and oddly enough the site architecture he proposes as being ideal, is exactly the IA I have used for a site I'm developing for an entertainment booking agency.

Another one worth reading is from the man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee Cool URIs don't change

I would rewrite domain/page?id=stuff to domain/kewords.html.

I primarily use AdWords and optimize campaign keywords ->ad->landing page. In my experience, keywords in the url / uri have been critical in AdWords placement and ad costs. I would think that extrapolates to natural SERPS as well.

news/category/id/article-title.html

coz it follows the navigation.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Because vbSEO does more than rewrite URLs.

And all those little things that it does adds up to one nice search engine friendly website.

exactly ALL the things it does not just rewriting URLs

Rewriting URLs is a massive part of vbSEO's system.

It doesn't specifically call them "Search Engine Friendly URLs" for no reason.