I tried to get too cute with my permalinks. And now I am paying for it on some of my blogs. I’d like to change my categories. But guess what? When I created my common structure I used category as one of the options for posting. So now if I remove/change category as part of the URL structure, those posts that are already indexed by the search engines will come up lame. Yes, I suppose I could use the 301 redirect to get the SE back on track, but what a pain. I guess. I have no idea how to use it and am not inclined to learn right now.
Here is the code I used: /%category%/%postname%/
Here is the code I should have used: /%postname%/
That way I could have changed my categories around to my heart’s content. It’s not like I plan on changing the post title.
You know, I really think the second most important thing for search engine glory, behind getting linked, is to create meaningful titles in your posts or articles. Just using the postname should be sufficient for SEO. ack
4 responses so far ↓
Tom // May 24, 2007 at 11:34 am
I recently read in a study that URL paths don’t contribute to ranking at all. According to the tests conducted only the domain name and the file name were relevant, keyword rich paths made no difference in ranking. So you might as well use /%postname%/ in WP.
Tom
Manuel Viloria // May 25, 2007 at 9:51 am
Hi Splork,
Try the Permalink Redirect Plugin (scroll down to the section marked permalink_redirect_oldstruct)
Manuel
Splork // May 25, 2007 at 9:58 am
Thanks Manuel. Just what I was looking for. Gotta love those plugins.
Stephen Cronin // Jul 9, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I got caught by this too! Luckily I realised this pretty quickly, so my second post was a caution for beginners about using /%category%/%postname%/.
We need to spread the word, because there are hundreds of posts about how good /%category%/%postname%/ is, and almost none about the potential problems.
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