Which Permalink Structure is best?

[Alan Petersen]

Hello, on my wordpress blog, I'm using the "Date and name based" permalink structure option. For SEO purposes is my choice fine or should I use a custom structure to take the date out?

[Lynn Terry]

The date is only necessary if it is relevant to your posts or content. Usually it is not. I prefer category/post-title, but am currently using the post ID (number) and the post title on mine (just havent gone through the trouble of changing it).

It makes sense for the URL to contain relevant information about the page content, and not information that isnt useful to both humans and bots.

[Alan Petersen]

Thanks Lynn, that's what I was thinking, the url is soooo long with the date. I think I might be stuck though since I have some good sites linking to a specific post so if I change it, wouldn't it make those links to the date url go 404?

[theuniek1]

[Lynn Terry]

[Alan Petersen]

The plugin option sounds good, I googled and found this one:

http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permali ... on-plugin/

Teli, is that the one you were thinking about?

It looks this plugin creates a 301 redirect which should do the trick. I'm going to install the plugin on my sandbox blog which I only use for testing to see how it works. I'll report back here.

[Alan Petersen]

I tested the plugin and it works very nice. Once activated it creates a "permalinks migration" tab in the options menu. You enter your soon-to-be old permalink structure there then you go the "permalinks" tab and select your new permalink structure. In my test I went from:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

to:

/%postname%/

The old links to the posts with the year, month, day, and post name re-directed to the post with the new link without any issues and broken links. The plugin author states it won't affect SE rankings and you won't lose link love.

I'm off to change my links to /%category%/postname%/

[theuniek1]

Yep, that's the one.