I have a site, sort of a blog, you can access articles like that: http://www.example.com/article/416/how-to-buy-a-good-car The "how-to-buy-a-good-car" is added from the description of the article, for SEO. All I check is the 416, which is the ID of the article. So you put something like: http://www.example.com/article/416/mama-wants-to-go-to-the-mall Is going to work as well, and it will load the how to buy a car article. My question is: what if somebody start to "pollute" search engines like Google and Yahoo to put all kind of keywords in my URL. Will that affect negatively my rankings? Thank you!
Yes - it's best for your URL to be properly unique, otherwise you can end up with multiple URLs showing the same content: i.e. duplicate content. I'd recommend you use proper long URL logic to ensure this. It can even happen by accident - someone copies and pastes your URL to put on their blog, but it gets truncated or they only copy half of it by accident. For them the URL still works, but for you it's duplicate content. It's even worse if one day you make a mistake and generate a whole batch of duplicate URLs on your site by mistake. The Times in the UK did this once, and ended up being abused by people who linked to completely made up URLs. They not only ended up with the wrong URLs in the search results, they ended up with a PR nightmare as these URLs were damaging or libellous.
Yes, your website can get the blame for it. Make sure you keep it as unique as possible in order to avoid anything being shown as duplicate to Google. Especially, if your running unique content on the site.
i think its ok... you site should do just fine. its the ip address will get blamed rather than your url.
Ant sort of spam... whether within the content of your site or in its links, is subject to a potential penalty.