For example, consider the following SEF URL:

domain.com/a-very-long-complicated-title.html

The pageId for this SEF URL could be

domain.com/p456

Clearly, pageIds offer a number of uses and advantages over URL shortening services:

• They are very short, perfect for Twitter, micro-blogging, print media, SMS/text messaging and even a good old-fashioned phone call
• They are self-hosted and thus not dependent on an external service. A pageId is thus always going to work as long as your web site is online. If a URL shortening service is offline or goes out of business, all of the short URLs that you have distributed will not redirect to your site and will cost you traffic.
• They help build and maintain trust among your site visitors as your domain is a part of the pageId. In contrast, you never know where a bit.ly redirect will take you.

Here are some pageId features:

• They are automatically created for you and stored in your database.
• They are permanent and not customizeable (you can create an alias for any existing SEF URL for this purpose)
• They are unique (of course).
• They do not conflict with aliases (see above) thus allowing you to have numerous URLs to access your content.
• They are not indexed by search engines as a 301 redirect is performed from the pageId to the original SEF URL. Thus, you will not be penalized for a lack of keywords in the pagId as the SEF URL will be indexed.

To enable pageId, simply open the sh404SEF® configuration screen. Enable pageId on the pageId tab. On the By Component tab, pageId must be individually enabled for each component.If you are already using sh404SEF®, you'll need to purge all your existing URLs. When you refresh your home page to rebuild your SEF URLs, the pageIds will be created.

You can view the pagIds from both the pageId manager and the URL manager in the Joomla administrative backend (see below). To conveniently display the pageId on the public frontend of your web site, simple create a new custom HTML  module and publish it in a convenient module position. The content of the module should be as follows: wh

That’s about all there is to pageId in sh404SEF® v2. Be sure to tell us how you like it!