SEO Permalinks - what to use? Category or postname or both?

by 9 replies
11
Hi everyone...

I have a question about permalinks for Wordpress.

So far I've stumbled across two types which people are using for SEO purposes:

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


The difference is the one with category adds the category we pick into the URL.

So which one is much more effective? Any opinion?
#search engine optimization #category #permalinks #postname #seo
  • I,m using cat and post name,

    I do this so I,m able to chain the catogorys from my posts but to be honest I dont have enough experience yet with enough sites to tell you which is better.

    Having said, when I backlink I do get other pages/posts being pulled up in the serps along with the posts I,m targeting.
    • [1] reply
    • My vote is for using the post name alone, because
      1. Keywords in URL make only a slight difference for SEO purposes
      2. What little power they do have is best used undiluted
      3. Extra slashes/subfolders in the URL reduce the page's importance and Page Rank (although Google denies this, SEOmoz has tested this and found it to be true)
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [2] replies
  • I only use the postname. That way, if I want to put a post in two categories (which happens not that often, but it does) I don't have to worry about it.

    Leslie
    • [1] reply
    • Use the date archive in the URL without fail!

      None of the others can be justified as much as it can.
  • The one that you build the most and best links to will be the most effective method.

    That said, either one is fine depending on how your site is structured and what kind of advertising you're using and perhaps some other factors.

    If you're running a tight niche site, you only want one category anyway so why bother including it in the URL? In this case, just use the postname. If you're doing a broad niche, like auto parts, you might want to have categories for brands and so forth.

    For advertising, Adsense tends to use the URL information as one of the criteria on which ads to display. You only want the most relevant and best paying ads to be displayed so postname generally works better. Other ad programs it probably doesn't matter.

    Other factors would mainly be human factors. Having the keyword targeted postname visible in search results seems to help sometimes with click-thru but this varies a bit.
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