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Also, trailing slash?  Or no trailing slash?

Without

/downloads/878/fsx-concorde

With

/downloads/878/fsx-concorde/

Dear Theo,

Thank you for your response - i found your article very interesting.

So, just to clarify - in our case, the best URL method would be:

/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/

This would remove the suffixes and also have the ID numbers at the end; placing the target keywords closer to the root of the URL; which makes a very slight difference...

EDIT: Upon thinking about it, I feel that the final keyword-targeted page would be more natural if it appeared at the end of the URL.  For example: /images/6816/aosta-valley/ (like you have done on your blog).

Also, should I limit the amount of hyphenated words in the URL?  For example in your blog, you have /does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/ - perhaps it would be more concentrated and less spammy as /adding-suffix-urls-affect-seo/ ?

Let me know your thoughts.

Thank you for your help!

We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /.

For example:

/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html

We are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories.  For example, the above URLs would be the following:

/images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html

Would we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes?  Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy?  Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory:

/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/

If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/

Just looking for some clarity to our problem!

Thank you for your help guys!