I am new at WP, so please suggest me which format is best for post url, yourdomain.com/post.... yourdomain.com/cat/post... yourdomain.com/month,year/post and doest using .html at end of url gives better result in search. Please waiting for your suggestion Regards
I always refrain from putting dates in the URL. It not only looks messy, but google news doesn't like it very much either. From an SEO standpoint I've always got the best results with .html
I see a lot of people saying this and I have never seen any concrete proof that SE's give more weight to a URL simply because of having .html on the end. If you think about it, it actually makes no sense and it if were true, every website on the web would be using this format and as you see, they don't. The ONLY people I see changing to this structure are small bloggers who think it gives them some kind of leg up. Don't get me wrong..it doesn't hurt anything, but it's not the SEO answer that everyone keeps saying it is. Not saying I am some kind of SEO guru, but I would really like to see proof of this written by a reputable SEO source.
Obviously it's not some kind of magic bullet that will solve all your SEO issues. However, it goes without saying that these: http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/category/why-widgets-are-cool.html http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/search/search-term are not only more readable and memorable, but are easier for the retarded spiders to deal with... than say, these: http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/?post_id=121 http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/?seach=search%20term
I and lots of bloggers use /%postname%/, but it is not recommended in wordpress.org guide due to performance issues. http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
No - the one before it is a better style. Not just that, you're also following quite a uniform standard. If you've ever programmed a scrapper or spider you'll know what I mean, it's hard (impossible?) to write regular expressions for every type of URL - so if you follow some kind of standard (like good olde' .html pages) then it makes sense that more bots will index your pages better (people seem to forget how advanced googles spiders really are... not all search engines are this good).
I still don't see where this makes any sense. You are saying after 15 years of search engines, we have gone backwards and spiders see .html better than pages that don't end in it ? That there is a preference and I still haven't seen any actual proof of this.just speculation and opinion. What ever your page URL structure is, it is the same all over your site, so it is a uniformed standard. How come I have never heard any mention of this from Google or any other search engine? I have only heard this from bloggers and forgive me, but bloggers have a tendency to bandwagon every new little piece of information like it's the second coming of the internet. In a few months something else will be the next new thing. Can anyone point to any documentation that backs this up at all?
No, most spiders will see it the same - all the major ones definitely will. I'm making it easier for the smaller players, I've wrote crawlers before and I choose to structure my pages in a way that I could most easily crawl them. It IS personal preference. I mean uniform to the web in general. Things are no doubt changing, hell - take a look at Amazons URLs. They're huge and they still manage to rank - and yet they still insist on using the meta keywords tag. Something I don't use, once again out of my own belief that it holds no value. That's all SEO is! it's damn hard to out right prove something is 100% the truth and is effective. There are too many variables to consider, hell... I've had a client that insisted I change his text colour to grey because he thought it made him rank better! I'm no blogger and I don't do it because they say so (I don't read blogs, mostly for the reason you pointed out). I do it because it's my preference and it's not counter productive. My sites rank, and they rank well. SEO isn't a science. It's built up of people experimenting and extrapolating the factors that they think made them rank... as I said, a client of mine thought font colour was of paramount importance - my opinion says it's not, does it make it right? no of course not (google sure wouldn't tell me). It's not objective, it's an art. Have you seen any university offer a degree in SEO? Another thing, google don't give SEO's much to go on either - they throw us breadcrumbs via Matt Cutts (and their crappy guidelines) every now and again, but nothing of value.
I'm not saying that there may not be anything to, I'm just saying that I have only heard people stating opinion, I haven't seen any documentation that supports it. Something from an SEO blog (a reputable one) , some kind of article from an industry source that mentions it. Does anyone have anything or is it all "I heard" and it's just being passed around as gospel?
It's all subjective. I go by the results I've had with using .html. I'm not trying to force my opinion on you, if you don't do it that way - it's fine . There are times where it's helped me out though - I've had to convert a few websites from ASP to PHP. Luckily, from users perspective all the pages ended in .html. If this wasn't the case, all the pages would have changed from .asp to either .php or .html (or just no extension). So all the spiders data would be out of date, and the next time they crawl they will get either a crap load of 404's or 302's. Not a major issue, but I've seen that kind of thing kill sites for a few weeks. Another thing - I've got no doubt google treats .php's differently. Once again, this is not "ohh I heard". It's just from my own experience. (my personal sites pages all end in .php, I won't change it )
So I don't understand why not just leave pages as they are with no extension? Why go through the trouble if it's really not necessary? I have never had a problem getting crawled, as a mater of fact I think Google and Yahoo slurp visit too much. If this is all about just getting crawled and nothing else, then it really seems insignificant because getting crawled has never been a problem, its actually faster now than it's ever been. 3 years ago, I may have seen this as helpful, but I really still just don't see it making that much of a difference and especially not providing any extra help in rankings. And again still not one can point me to a resource or article that discusses this? You would think that if this had some validity that someone would have written about it by now. I did find one thread from webmaster world from 3 years ago where it seems others were in agreement back then that it makes absolutely no difference to Google what you end your pages in: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3502253.htm
And once again - it's from my own personal experience. I'm very happy with the results I'm getting, so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.