Forum Moderators: open
I have three questions regarding this.
Example old(current) url:
http://www.example.net/2008/07/18/this-is-the-title-of-my-post/
or
http://www.example.net/2008-07-18/this-is-the-title-of-my-post/
I have been experimenting with the url, I need to somehow uniquely identify a post - either by date or id. Just using the title is not good enough and can confuse wordpress.
1) Which would be the best in terms of seo? The date of the post has absolutely no relevance to the site, the only time it is shown is in the url.
http://www.example.net/3527/this-is-the-title-of-my-post/
http://www.example.net/this-is-the-title-of-my-post/3527/
Where 3527 is the unique post id.
I prefer the look of the first, but the second will put the keywords closer to the domain.
2) Would these new structures be any better that the current date based?
3) If they are better, should I change over my existing sites to the new structure or leave it how it is. The site I am thinking of will have 2000 odd posts, so that's a lot of redirects to process.
4) yeah I know I said 3. Any other alternatives for a wordpress post permalink structure?
Many thanks in advance
Tim
Best directory and URL structure for SEO [webmasterworld.com]
My preference with wordpress is to use a
/category/title-snippetexample.com/examples/first-example
If you use must use an ID number, I recommend putting it last in the URL: it's the least useful part of the URL for a user.
I would ideally prefer to use a category before post name as it is more natural, but since a post can be in more than one category and (as far as I know) there is no way to tell Wordpress what category to use in the permalink. I did try this a while back with some random results.
I also agree with putting the id at the end, but I feel that this just makes the user want to change it. Maybe that's not really a big problem. Either way it results in a shorter url - also more of the relevant url in the results listings.
If I do go this route, anybody know how I can automatically generate 2000 htaccess RedirectPermanent's?
Tim
I feel that this just makes the user want to change it
Yes! That way user can explore your site, even without any prior knowledge of it. It shouldn't be a security concern (or at least, it should be a security concern that your developers have already dealt with).
automatically generate 2000 htaccess RedirectPermanent's?
I'll be blunt: you shouldn't need to. It should be a case of relatively simple pattern-matching. If not, then take care to make sure the next set of URLs will be future-proof :)
