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Best Permalink structure for Wordpress blogs

Posted 22nd May 2009 | Comments

Your Wordpress blogs permalink structure is pretty important in ranking well in search engines and since Wordpress provides many ways to create your permalink structure sometimes it can be difficult to decide which is the best permalink structure for your Wordpress blog. By default Wordpress uses a permalink structure like "xr.com/?p=123" which is pretty useless if your looking to optimize your blog posts for search engines. Then there is the date and name option or the month and name option which can be useful if your a news blog or if the dates play a important role in your blog. But by far the most preferred option by many bloggers is creating there own custom structure to better optimize there blog posts for search engines.

If you have looked at most blogs they have chosen %postname% as there custom structure and even I had it like that until yesterday. Yesterday I installed this free SEO blog plug-in ( if you think giving your e-mail address is free :) ) , what id basically does is recommends some plug-ins for you and then set there settings and some Wordpress settings for you. So I installed it and activated it and did the necessary steps mentioned in the instructions and one of the changes it did was change my permalink structure from %postname% to /%post_id%/%postname%/. It looked a bit ugly to me but anyway decided to do some searching before changing it back to the previous one. And was pretty amazed to find out this in Wordpress documentation about Permalinks.

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or post_name fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID - Wordpress documentation

Another thing to remember is this performance issue will only come for blogs with lots of posts.If your blog only has 30-40 posts then you want have a performance problem. But you never know whether your blog will take off and you might decide to write lots of posts. So it is always a good idea to have a permalink structure with numbers in it.

I would like to know whats your permalink structure and what are your reasons for using them. If your using only %post_name% field will you decide to change it now or what's the reason for not doing it. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Let's be sociable, come on, you know you want to. I appreciate the support.

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Post Title: Best Permalink structure for Wordpress blogs
Author: Nishadha
Posted: 22nd May 2009
Filed As: Blogging Tips, Traffic Building Tips
Tags: , , , , , ,
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  • Alan
    So, here's the thing... I personally used %category% slash %postname% before. But given this recommendation, I still have a slightly different conclusion. Why not do the best of both worlds? Why is it necessary to remove the %category%? That can be very useful for your highlevel keywords that you are trying to build SEO juice for. So, why not use the following: %post_id% slash %category% slash %postname% This way you don't have any performance issues of leading with the %postname% or %category% but you still get the seo benefits of using both. The URL is only a little more messy - not much, usually just 2 numbers and a slash... Your thoughts?
  • I think you have made a very good point , having the category as well in the title is a great way to improve your SEO provided you have named your categories well.
  • V.C
    It might be a good idea to leave a unique number in your permalinks. I often have posts with the same name and it can be troublesome unless you leave in date or post_id information. I currently use: /%category%/%post_id%/%postname%
  • Alan
    I think, according to the post above, that /%post_id%/%category%/%postname% would be preferable because by leading with the %post_id% numeric FIRST you are avoiding the performance hit - right?
  • Thanks for sharing this , yep its another advantage of adding post id to permalinks
  • My current permalink is /year/month/day/post name/

    Is this bad for SEO. I have avery good SEO traffice and this permalink is ther from last 1 and half year.
  • This is a very good permalink structure , other than a text only permalink ( eg - %post_name% ) any other structure with numerics is good. ( eg - %post_id% / %post_name% , %year% / %post_name% )
  • I've been using Jeff Johnson's plugin on all my (and clients) blogs for several months now and the automatic tweaks (like the one you mention) make a huge difference to how the search engines rate and rank your sites.

    Glad you found it!

    Andrew
  • Ya , that feature , auto tagging , tag suggestions and lots of more things are there , glad I found it too :)
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