Blog URLs
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I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea.
e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/
However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently.
e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/
Does anyone have any views on this?
Thanks
Ben
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Thanks Tom,
That's all very useful stuff, and food for thought.
Cheers
Ben
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Hi Ben,
The benefits include:
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having a shorter URL
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moving keywords to earlier positions in the URL
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making the pages appear not so deep in the site structure
Some people have said they don't want the date in the URL to devalue a post in a readers mind, where others have said it is useful information for a reader to know the date of a post.
As with most things SEO, it is a case of 'it depends'.
I would add that the 301 redirects shouldn't take too long to sort out and test, and so don't let that weigh too heavily into your decision; decide what you think is the best decision from the SEO point of view and then worry about if that means you need to do 301 redirects,
-Tom
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Fight, Fight!
Thanks everyone, that's useful to know. Can anyone explain the SEO advantages of removing the year and month from my URLs? And are they significant enough, that I should consider doing it - with the necessary 301 redirects in place?
Ben
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Trust me, you won't run into any resource problems unless you plan to serve to the ten's of thousands!
I personal use mysite.com/postname as I find the category of a post dilutes the target keywords.
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Ben - you could start a real fight on this topic!!
I myself am a:
/blog/category/post-name/
or
/blog/post-name/
kind of guy, but it can differ depending on circumstances.
It is important to decide on a convention, then stick to it, and make sure you are serving each post via only a single URL. If you've not checked out 'All in one SEO pack' for Wordpress then certainly take a look at that.
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I use /%category%/%postname%/ haven't had any resource problems yet.
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