If your products, categories, pages or blogs have not been SEO optimised with a custom SEO filename, then every page still needs a unique URL. The URLs that have numbers in them are the default URL.
In the SEO area, or the SEO tab, you can find a few different ways to add SEO filenames to your pages, products, categories and blogs.
You should use a unique filename for each item, irrespective of it being a page or product etc. The filename needs to be unique across your whole website.
Generally speaking, you should not see the numerical URLs after you give a page or product a unique SEO filename. Ensure you have clicked publish and cleared your cache.
If you still see the numerical URLs, please check to see if you have created any custom links/buttons in your content using the link wizard. The link wizard remembers the link as it was when the item was linked. These links to do change unless you go back and use the link wizard again to update the link.
In some cases, our system deliberately uses the numerical URLs, when it wants to be sure it is fetching the latest information from the database. Such might happen if a user is logged in, a shopping cart is underway, the default currency has changed, or the user is navigating to additional pages in a pagination.
You do not need to worry about the perception of duplicate content.
If a page has a custom SEO filename, it will be included as the canonical URL in a meta tag. The search robots will not index the URL if the page has specified the correct canonical URL. It is common to have more that one URL, as the content may change based on language, currency, or discounts for an active cart.
The search robot will understand, that only the canonical URL specified in the page meta html is the only URL it should index. The canonical URL is the authoriative way that a website tells a search robot what is the most appropriate page to index.
A website still needs the ability to display more than one variation of a page based on session, currency etc.
No you should not. If you do this, you will likely create alot of work for yourself, and alot of problems with circular redirects and server errors.
If your URL appears to have numbers in it, (e.g. https://www.mywebsite.com/product/733136) make sure you have specified the SEO filename. If you have done this, your issue should go away.