Wordpress permalinks? postname or category/postname

Why are you trying to fix something that isn't broken

Here is an idea.

Consolidate as you plan. Don't delete the pages that the content in the consolidated page came from. Noindex them. That way your back links still work. At the top of each of those pages put a link to the consolidated article.

You are right that changing permalinks is easy, dealing with the aftermath is often a pain and much more involved than you thought. Your retweets and the like would be fine ASSUMING you 301 each and every page and every way way to get to it in wordpress, but as I said, leave it there and put a new link saying there is an updated page available.

It's not worth it to change url structure either. The business of key-word-stuffing-urls-to-the-nth-degree-is-getting-old-and-makes-for-really-long-urls-that-look-spammy. Category name just adds another / and more words lengthening the url even further.

If I use postname, I never let it generate automatically. I put what I want there for a slug. That said, I prefer to use post id. It's more performanant, guaranteed unique, ultra short and so on. I'd like to see any study done in 2014 that shows keywords in the url are better than post id or wp stock urls with the variable. Way too much thinking, and overthinking is being done with respect to a bloody url.

Don't change the permalink structure, there is nothing wrong with your current permalink structure.

For the record, I've started using /category/postname on my new affiliate sites with exponential results thus far. I hard-code custom-built category pages.

a) Remove the posts from showing on category pages
b) Show category description on categories
c) Install plugin to allow HTML in category descriptions

If my homepage targets "blender reviews", my category will target "breville blender reviews". This means that the categories are now ranking for their own terms and bringing in hard, converting traffic.

I built the category pages as I would the homepage, only targeting a very specific keyword.

My review structure then looks like:

juicerreviews.com/breville/breville-bfg-283-review

I use breadcrumbs to feed juice from the review back into the category. Having this structure really helps Google to identify what the content is about, and where other RELEVANT content is sitting (in the same category). You'll see this because Google shows the category>postname in the search results - showing that it has identified a category for that post.

It's more work, but like I said, my own results have shown me that ranking a site is 2x easier when implementing the above structure. All of my new affiliate sites now use that above structure, and I'd never go back. Whatever people say, I've seen a hard increase on rankings, visitors and profits.

You are good with your current Permalinks Settings. You don't have to change anything.

You are good in front of the search engines with that link structure.

To answer your questions ....

Have I made incorrect assumptions about the social sharing and the SERPs?

Yes.

Is the category/postname really that superior to just plain old postname?

Not really. You are good with either one.

What would you do if you had a site with about 250 pages of content.

If the Permalinks were Blog.com/Postname - I would just leave it alone.

I hope this helps!!

I wish you the best of the best!

Cheers!

The permalink structure should look like this

/%postname%/

I think though by default wordpress has it setup like this. Though i could be wrong.