“BEST” search engine friendly permalink strcture

well, I’m an SEO specialist… don’t know if that’s enough proof for ya or not.

i’ll tell you this, and you make your own conclusions:

1. URLs mean VERY little anymore as far as the search engines are concerned.
2. That said, the shorter and more precise the URL is, the better – if only for spidering and listing, as well as simplicity for you, the blog owner.
3. When in doubt, see #1.

At one point, years ago, it was widely accepted that the more keywords you had in your URL the better. This is no longer true. What IS true, is that your URLs should be short and to the point.

I’m not a SEO specialist, but I play one on TV… ??

My site has been going for two and a half years with p=# style URLs. I can’t see evidence that it has dramatically affected my search rankings. I’ll be moving to nice permalinks when I upgrade the site, just as it ‘feels’ friendlier, but the reality is the search engines care about the page content, link contents, heading contents, etc. — the actual URL itself, from what I’ve read, was largely dismissed years ago.

-d

/category/post-name-like-this is the best, but like others have said, it will hardly make or break you compared to stuff like layout and keywords in posts

Yeah, it seems the whole thing about urls like
example.com/?p=23456
versus
example.com/1951/11/13/this-post-is-about-my-grandfathers-lost-dreams
is about having human-friendly urls. Search engines seem not to care at all.

(just for clarification: I am not a seo pro either:)

even if your permalink structure doesn’t help seo (which is should, at least a tiny bit) having links that describe the content on the page is useful to users, and can get your higher click throughs in the engines too, IMO

lol sorry about making the whole “pro” statement – was just trying to assure that i sort of “know my stuff” is all… was the only “proof” i could offer up.

webtodd – even though it “should” – it doesn’t.

and how many people do you really know that click on a link to go somewhere in your site, but only if the URL looks like it might be interesting?

people click on links.
the link should have the descriptive title of where it’s taking you.
that’s truly the only thing that makes a difference, and yes, THAT will affect your rankings.
but what the actual URL is means nothing.

you could have the domain name “oranges.com” and ONLY talk about apples. it wouldn’t mean squat to the search engines. sure, THAT part might confuse visitors. but the difference between
oranges.com/orange-juice
and
oranges.com/?p=34
really means nothing if people are looking for general information on oranges…

but if they’re looking for orange juice, the title of your post will be the one that the search engines list you by… not the URL.

gah.
i’m getting too deep into this.

bottom line: the permalink structure means nothing to SEO. period.

I just use site.com/postid as that gives me wicked short urls compared to site.com/2006/04/26/why-i-dont-like-long-urls-for-permalinks

lol @ your example, resiny ??
and great reasoning!

Thanks everyone. I’ve been using the standard site.com/?p=123 and have not wanted to convert. It’s nice knowing there’s no reason to do so.

other than aesthetics, but that’s not really all that important. I do it because I’m a neat freak (in some ways, at least…)

is there a URL-shortening plugin so that

site.com/2006/04/26/is-there-a-url-shortening-plugin

can be easily changed to

site.com/2006/04/26/url-shortening-plugin

aaron – you don’t need a plugin. when you write the post, you can change that part under “post slug” – just make sure to use hyphens for spaces, and no other form of punctuation.

you could write a post called “Is there a URL shortening plugin?” and force it to be "site.com/i-love-peanuts" if you wanted to… just put whatever you want under “post slug” before you publish.

Is it safe to do this in mySQL? I have over 3000 posts on my blog since 2002 and I’d like to go after every post with a post name longer than 30 characters. To have to do this through the WP admin will take way too long.

If you want to do it “retroactively” I hope you are aware that all the links that would go to the long version will not work anymore if you change the slugs.
Practically, if other sites link to certain posts, or search engines have indexed those posts with the long url – all those links will be lost.

Well, for us, we use /%post-name, it’s the best option.