Comments on: Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding Wordpress Permalinks

By: Shambhavi

Shambhavi — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:57:45 +0000

If you do not have the date in post permalinks, Google grabs the date from the post metadata and puts it at the beginning of the description/ excerpt. This makes the date even more prominent for the searcher.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:45:28 +0000

Mike that URL structure is potentially better than what I suggested, though I haven’t tested it or gone through the code.

With the .html on the end of the URL, it can’t be a category, tag or page, thus it has to be a post.

I came up with testing the .html in my structure based on the suggestion that you can also use /post/%category%/%postname% to avoid verbose queries, plus I was using it anyway after migrating from blogspot and it just made things more natural.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:53:41 +0000

After reading what everyone had to say from both sides I am going to stick with /%postname%.html. Thanks for the information from both sides.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:00:43 +0000

I would say it’s a bit harsh to qualify the SEO’s advice as “wrong”. Wrong or right often depends on the point of view. Wrong from an SEO point of view? Wrong from a usability point of view? Wrong from a php developers point of view? In this case it seems to be 2:1 for seo/usability in contrast to technical difficulties. And even if one decides that having only keywords in the URL for technical reasons, there are still other options, for example simply the numerical ID of the post. The date might look nicer but in reality it does not give the user so much important information, and it becomes completely irrelevant if a post is not news-related but is a great piece of information that is still valid after some time.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:50:46 +0000

I think the title of your article is a bit misleading. SEOs gave valid advice about search engine optimization. Your comments are about Wordpress/LAMP optimization. Seems to me as a blog publisher you’ll want to prioritize your readers’ convenience first, then SEO, and your server last of all. Search engines reward sites that have queried keywords as close to the beginning of the URL as possible. Better to have a slow, popular blog than a fast, invisible one, right?

Plus, couldn’t a plugin like WP-Cache help by converting dynamic pages to static HTML once per hour (or day) and pushing those to web agents? I’m pretty sure the problem you’re talking about was addressed years ago by static cacheing plugins.

By: Updating Search Engine Friendly Links with WordPress | Cape Cod SEO

Updating Search Engine Friendly Links with WordPress | Cape Cod SEO — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:56:34 +0000

[...] pointed me to an interesting post (via Twitter) by Robert Rolfe on how SEO’s are giving the wrong advice when creating search engine friendly links with [...]

By: Andy Langton

Andy Langton — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:27:03 +0000

Many of the commenter above get it.

To advocate a user-unfriendly solution for technology reasons says more about the technology you use than anything else.

Calling out a section of the online community is an obvious ploy to attract attention.

Put your URLs full of numbers in front of users, and see whether they prefer a URL that *tells them what they are going to find at the destination*. Date might tell them a little, but that’s like judging a book based entirely on when it was published.

By: Shoemoney

Shoemoney — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:01:40 +0000

Thx for the kind words. I never really gave SEO a second though…

I am not a SEO

By: Some Interesting SEO Blog Posts « jeffreydemers.com

Some Interesting SEO Blog Posts « jeffreydemers.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:01:42 +0000

[...] was an interesting post on the best wordpress permalink structure – interesting that Matt Cutts weighed in as well. The comments section here – where I weighed in [...]

By: Scott Clark

Scott Clark — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:27:03 +0000

I’ve always used the date based posting structure, mainly because the stuff I put in my blog *is* dated and *will* be out of date someday. I maintain an article tree in my static pages for the evergreen stuff. If something is in a post that belongs in a page, I’ll move it and 301 the post.