Best Wordpress Permalink Structure - Avoiding Duplicates/Maintaining Good

[roley]

I have noticed on many sites using wordpress that some people opt for

domain.com/brown-dog/

domain.com/pets/dogs/brown-dog

domain.com/brown-dog-246/

domain/246/brown-dog

which do you think is better from the above from a search engine point of view ( i.e the mighty google )?

I want to avoid duplicates as my site is geared towards posts which may have the same url... and so im using the ID in the url like

domain.com/brown-dog-246/

But im wondering if that is the best way to go to squeeze the most out of seo without overdoing it though

[Jon Potts]

I would say this looks right. Although I do not think Wordpress will allow you to have duplicates, it will number them for you if they have the same name. Adding the ID only makes it easier to differentiate between them.

[webapex]

I just use domain-PostName, the default cryptic code is definitely bad for seo, very deep/long paths are probably bad too.

[SamFrankly84]

If it's a small Wordpress site:

domain.com/brown-dog/

If it's a giant Wordpress site that is heavily dependent upon articles and categories actually become important:

domain.com/training-dogs/brown-dog/

[anestbaik]

my suggestion ->
/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%

[Gail Sober]

I used to use the category/postname structure until I noticed this

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties).

So I would suggest starting with the month, year or combination. Might not make a difference on a very small site though.

Here's the url to Wordpress where the above paragraph came from http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

[roley]

Originally Posted by SamFrankly84

If it's a small Wordpress site:

domain.com/brown-dog/

If it's a giant Wordpress site that is heavily dependent upon articles and categories actually become important:

domain.com/training-dogs/brown-dog/

But if you have 3 categories and long posts

domain.com/animals/pets/dogs/what-type-of-dog-sleeps-alll-through-the-night/

That is going to be too long i imagine

[roley]

Originally Posted by Gail Sober

I used to use the category/postname structure until I noticed this


So I would suggest starting with the month, year or combination. Might not make a difference on a very small site though.

Here's the url to Wordpress where the above paragraph came from Using Permalinks « WordPress Codex

Right but they also say that about just having it start with

%postname%

but we see that ranking all the time. it doesnt effect anything

[Gail Sober]

but we see that ranking all the time. it doesnt effect anything

I wasn't talking about ranking, I was referring to your websites speed/performance.

For ranking, I would prefer using category/postname and I was a little worried but changing the structure to something easier on the server but it hasn't affected my rankings at all.

For smaller amounts of traffic, it might not matter much.

[roley]

Originally Posted by Gail Sober

I wasn't talking about ranking, I was referring to your websites speed/performance.

For ranking, I would prefer using category/postname and I was a little worried but changing the structure to something easier on the server but it hasn't affected my rankings at all.

For smaller amounts of traffic, it might not matter much.

Problem with category though seems to be as mentioned on this site

Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful » Otto on WordPress

So i have considered a number in my urls ( postid) but then what happens when i have 50,000 pages.. Now i have a url that is like

domain.com/52343453453453/this-is-my-page-name/

so i am thinking of going with

domain.com/2010/page-name

or

domain.com/2010/12/page-name

Trying to see what is best for Large sites

[moonviper]

/%category%/%postname%/

---------------------------------
Over 50 different WordPress sites I run use the above permalink structure and it seems to work fantastically

[roley]

I agree for a regular wordpress site


But as that site above says http://ottopress.com/2010/category-i...dered-harmful/ Speed is an issue

Google says this now about speed

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

And the guy at url says

“See, when you request a URL from a WordPress site, WordPress gets the URL and then has to parse it to determine what it is that you’re actually asking for.
It does this by using a series of rules that are built whenever you add new content to WordPress. Generally the list of rules is pretty small, but there are specific cases that can cause it to balloon way out of control.”

And then on top of that you haev on Large based wordpress sites that also have the potential to have the SAME urls

i.e one person submits question and another person submits same question

you now have

domain.com/category/why-are-dogs-hairy.html

domain.com/category/why-are-dogs-hairy.html

now wordpress will add a number in like


domain.com/category/why-are-dogs-hairy.html

domain.com/category/why-are-dogs-hairy-2.html

But still thats going to get bad when you have hundreds similar questions

Lets take warrior forum... the links are like

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ning-good.html

There is a number in it to identify and to keep the urls unique in the chance someone posts the same question in the same category

This is what i am referring to.

Also if you have 3 deep categories and long post titles you are going to end up with mammoth url lengths

[anestbaik]

if category in permalink are "harmful",
you still can do ->
/%postname%-%post_id%/

to avoid redudancy / duplicate permalink (but in wp, it is already auto)

[roley]

I also wonder now with Google being big on

1. Speed
2. Geographics
3. Time/Relevancy

If having the date in the url will actually help with seo

[roley]

Originally Posted by anestbaik

if category in permalink are "harmful",
you still can do ->
/%postname%-%post_id%/

to avoid redudancy / duplicate permalink (but in wp, it is already auto)

what about

/%post_id%/%postname%/

Also do you think it matters if you leave the end with no extension?

I see people adding to their blogs

.php
.html
.htm

instead of

postname/

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by moonviper

/%category%/%postname%/

---------------------------------
Over 50 different WordPress sites I run use the above permalink structure and it seems to work fantastically

I use this or just %postname% on my WP sites with between 100 - 1500 pages per site with no performance issues.

Now, once you get into the 10000+ range you might encounter trouble due to limitations in both WP and MySQL but, unless you're running a mega-auto-blog it's unlikely that you'll encounter problems with decent hosting.

As for SEO and duplicate pages, use the canonical tag (Platinum SEO and other plugins will do this for you automatically) to indicate the page you want to take precedence in search results.

[Gail Sober]

Here's a couple of mine from different sites (copied exactly)

/%monthnum%/%postname%

/%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%/

/%day%%monthnum%%year%/%hour%%minute%/%category%/%postname%/

/%category%/%postname%/

/%year%/%category%/%postname%.html

They all rank well and I can see no difference in the serps between the structures.

[roley]

So you dont think

/%post_id%/%postname%

is a good idea?

[DJ DeMarco]

If our categories is our keywords, so /%category%/%postname%/ is the good choice.
But I prefer use only /%postname%.html and write my targeted keyword at my post title.

[WareTime]

Originally Posted by roley

I have noticed on many sites using wordpress that some people opt for

domain.com/brown-dog/

domain.com/pets/dogs/brown-dog

domain.com/brown-dog-246/

domain/246/brown-dog

which do you think is better from the above from a search engine point of view ( i.e the mighty google )?

I want to avoid duplicates as my site is geared towards posts which may have the same url... and so im using the ID in the url like

domain.com/brown-dog-246/

But im wondering if that is the best way to go to squeeze the most out of seo without overdoing it though

Those are all completely equal in the eyes of a search engine. URLS are a pointer (Locator) to a resource, nothing more. They can have value in the eyes of the web viewer.

Something with the words they are searching for looks promising and gets a click, or maybe they've been burned to many times by unscrupulous marketers and pay not attention to the url in the serps.

In this day and age I'd say make them as short as possible so they stay twitter-iffic. WP out of the box with NO permalink changes is just fine. As is %postid% or %postid%.html. Any of those are acceptably short. People spend too much time thinking about this, over-thinking it really. Just pick one and stick with it.

Keyword stuffed urls are yesterday.

[Scripteen]

Anything starting with /%post_id% is the best for performance.

[Jack Sprat]

Originally Posted by Bmarket

If our categories is our keywords, so /%category%/%postname%/ is the good choice.
But I prefer use only /%postname%.html and write my targeted keyword at my post title.

I also like the .html extension on both posts and pages and then if you want to turn the blog into plain old static html at some stage there is no need to do redirects of the URL as a 'static-like" URL structure is already in Google.

[User-Name]

Every blog I have I use %postname%
They all eventually end up 1 on google.
Thou my sites never have hundreds of posts so the category option never really enters into it.

[Muhammad Mustafa]

Based on my experience
domain.com/brown-dog/
is the best, then comes
domain.com/brown-dog.html