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]

The permalink structure you choose depends on your blog and its content. I use a variety of permalink structures on various blogs, but generally I stick with /id/post-name/ or some variation because it allows me to truncate the URL i.e. send out /id/ without the user being delivered a 404 error.

If you decide to change your permalink structure, there is a plugin which can help. The name escapes me at the moment. I did a side blog entry about it, though, so when I have a moment to look it up, I will and I'll post the link.

The downside is that you would need to wait for all your pages to be updated in the search engines and of course, you'll still have links floating around that lead to the old permalink structure.

~ Teli

[Lynn Terry]

Doesnt that code that WordPress gives you to put in your htaccess file take care of all that? Redirect the old pages to the new ones?

If not, I will be interested to hear about the plugin as well, because I was thinking of changing my permalink structure to category instead of post-id...

[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.