Hi, www.example.com/category/post-name/ www.example.com/post-name/ Which one of above is better in SEO? I know that having categories help users and SE bots in navigating. But my problem is most of my post names are long. So I don't want to make the URLs more longer by adding the category. And also one post can belong to more than one category and I may sometimes need to move a post from one category to another and rename an entire category. These scenarios make me go without category name. But would it affect much? Is having all posts at root level a bad habit? I have seen that many bloggers go without category name. Even Matt Cutts does so. Any comment is really appreciated.
The former is better for accessibility, information architecture and usability, which IMHO trumps SEO here. For the best of both worlds, go with the former but summarize the page name's URL with a couple keywords. For example, /about/online-awards-recognition-and-community-involvement/ can simply be reduced to /about/community-involvement/