Namorbia

Thank you for that code snippet!

Genesis’ breadcrumb should by default display hierarchical breadcrumbs. In essence, they should output the category structure: Home > Blog > Category > Post-name.

Actually Genesis doesn’t show the parent category in breadcrumbs, only the child category. I’ve tried. But it I can use the plugin Breadcrumb NavXT instead to fix that problem, so no worries.

In fact, WordPress requires a Blog page to be available. Failing to do so may cause bugs in some plugins and themes, and even within WordPress itself. […] Make sure a Blog is assigned to a page. This page may have an uncommon slug. […] Activate the “noindex”.

Can’t I just leave the Blog page blank? I can’t find any documentation or other threads that say you must have a Blog page. If you have any links where I can read more, I would truly appreciate it.

Mark Smallman, your visualization is exactly right.

There should be no issue at all with this setup regards to plugins or search engines.

I was a little worried about this because of another discussion here. Here are a few quotes from the second post there:

The Blog Page gives out several indicators to social sites and Search Engines that it’s a Blog. […] In fact, WordPress requires a Blog page to be available. Failing to do so may cause bugs in some plugins and themes, and even within WordPress itself. […] The Blog page is a reserved item within WordPress. Many WordPress functions and queries are written around this item.

He recommends that I do create a Blog page, but give it a slug I won’t use, noindex it, and then use the parent category “Blog” page as the actual blog page.

I’m not sure what part you don’t understand, but let me try to elaborate.

i mean the structure you want to have in your menu.

My menu structure would be the same regardless of whether I use a “posts page” or a “parent category” for the blog.

and show my latest posts at the blog category archive page instead

Was this the part you don’t understand?

You know how most WP blogs are set up, right? You usually show your latest posts either on:

• Your home page
• Or your “posts page”, if your home page is a static page

I don’t want to use either. I want to make a third option, where I assign the parent category “Blog” to all my posts, and you can view my latest posts by going to the archive page of the “Blog” category.

To the visitor it will look all the same, but the coding will be different.

I wanted to know whether problems like these might occur:

• Plugins won’t work because I don’t have a “posts page”
• Google won’t like my site, because it’s set up different from most WP blogs, and ranks my site lower / doesn’t show breadcrumbs in rich snippets / etc.

Or any other problems I might not think of.

Wow, thank you so much for the long answer. I read it several times but still feel a bit confused. I mean, to me the most logical structure of a website are permalinks like “mysite.com/blog/category/post-title” and breadcrumbs & rich snippets like “mysite.com > Blog > Category (> Post title)”. Strange that it’s so complicated to achieve this.

Some clarification on my setup:

• I only use one category per post and no parent categories (unless I decide to make “Blog” a parent category, but that’s just a technicality). So I won’t need the upcoming support for multiple breadcrumbs/hierarchies.
• I am using Genesis with the child theme Atmosphere Pro. (I read about this plugin’s origins and the Genesis connection, nice!)

In fact, WordPress requires a Blog page to be available. Failing to do so may cause bugs in some plugins and themes, and even within WordPress itself.

Really? I didn’t know that. I found a few sites that use a parent category for displaying all blog posts instead of a blog page. See the links at the end of this post.

6. Assign your posts to the Blog Category.

I would rather not do this, because “Blog” would appear in the “Filed under:” part of every single post. So posts will always have something like “Filed under: Blog, Interviews” or “Filed under: Blog, Resources”, which is redundant and looks bad. Plus, Genesis excludes the child category from breadcrumbs, if parent category is also assigned. But, if you only assign a child category, then both parent and child category appear in breadcrumbs. How strange!

Example websites of what I want:

Here some WP sites I found that use the structure that I want (/blog/category/post-title).

Websites with “Blog” as parent category:

wiideman.com
codigonexo.com (though “/blog” redirects to “/blog-tecnologia/”, so maybe it’s a combination of parent category and blog page?)
ianjgough.com

Websites possibly with “Blog” as parent category, not 100% sure:

interneteffect.com

Websites possibly with “Blog” as a Blog page, not 100% sure:

evanmarckatz.com
seventhqueen.com