Friendly URLS - by date or keyword

I am thinking about restructing the URLS on my website. It's fairly new site without a lot of traffic.

I'm currently using Wordpress with the url structure year/month/slug. Thinking about this further I think it might make more sense from a SEO perspective to not use the year/month but instead use categories or tags? What's the viewpoint of the readers here?

 

Depends how you have things structured. Sometimes cat name can be useful but 9 times out of ten I use a custom setting of %postname%

cant go wrong with that really.

hope that helps
Nigel

 

Right, but my concern is preventing Google from seeing duplicate content. So, right now my robots excludes /tags/ and /category/ from the index which means my site links are all based on the year/month. My thinking was if instead my links were based on /category postname I'd get an extra SEO boost?

 

Use the category name for SEO boost and it just looks better

 

Just %postname% is the best in my opinion for both usability and SEO. Your categories might change in the future and it is not needed in the URL.

 

The only downside to using %postname% is I've heard of some people having problems down the road. It makes the database think a lot harder, since the URL doesn't have any unique numbers in it. As you continue to add content, it's also possible that you may have pages/posts with similiar slugs.

It's actually better to use the /%postname%-%post_id% structure. It still keeps the keywords in the front. Plus if I recall, some websites such as Google News require you to have at least three numbers in the URL.

 

for permalinks i always love %postname%.html

 

any specific reason why you like adding the .html to the end?

 

Date is virtually worthless for your link structure...always go domainname.com/category/page-name

 

.html at the end intends to assure that page is static.

Regards

 

For SEO, use the %postname% structure. The date structure is good for organisation.

 

postname/month seems to work ok. And it gives the unique number mentioned earlier

 

.html for full blog web. I take .php ad the and when use my script in php and wordpress for blog. So the website under http://xxxxx/blog/xxxxxx.php
all file look like same cms