Hello, I think the way I set up my website is hurting me with search engine look ups. Currently my URL lists a post like this URL, DATE, TITLE http://www.imnotobsessed.com/2006/09/24/mischa-barton-has-won/ I think I might get picked up more if it looked more like this: URL, Category Name, Title http://www.imnotobsessed.com/Mischa-Barton/mischa-barton-has-won/ There is a quick way to make the change using my Wordpress software. BUT that would mean I would lose every single backlink to my site, including all pages that are indexed with google. I don't know what to do. Is it better to just leave it as is and hope that yahoo and msn eventually find me? OR should I take the big risk and lose everything I've worked on to make the URL structure work better for me in the long run? I just feel that the date in the URL is working to my disadvantage... Any thoughts? Thanks in advance Vera
How old is your blog? I normally start out with a good looking one...BUT if your blog is a well established one, it's probably not worth the risk. I wouldn't. The first one does have the post titles in it so it's not toally bad.
my blog is about 8 months old. BUT i have quite a following. I get about 25K uniques a day. I just know that I am hurting myself in the long run. I heard that my url structure is holding me back. But you are saying not to risk it and I guess I feel the same way. I just needed someone to tell me the same.... v
You're right, those dates are un-necessary and taking up space in your url unless the content on your site is something people would search for by typing in dates, like december 21st 2012 for example.
Vera, first check your logs. With this type of blog, maybe your repeated visitors prevail over the new visitors finding you through SEs. Just compare it. If new visitors % is low compared to the repeated visitors that usually go directly to your homepage (or domain name), you can dare to change the wordpress template. If not, you can either do the same as above and 301 redirect all the older posts (pretty hard work), or tickle your brain (or someone else´s, depends on you) and add some conditioning to your code, like all posts written before 25/09/2006 will have the old URL layout and all newer posts will look the way you proposed above. One more question will you store all posts related to Mischa Burton to the Mischa Burton subfolder?
Kaudo Is that possible? I am using Wordpress and the way you get to chose your url format is via radio buttons. There is no place to specifically write in rules. I know that I have tons of repeat visitors. But a lot of my traffic comes from daily link swaps that I do with about a dozen sites. Moving forward, I don't think it will hurt my traffic to do the switch. BUT I know I will lose all old links from everywhere if I do. The reason why I am so nervous about the switch is I did it once VERY early in my blog's life. Msn used to give me hundreds of hits a day. Now they give me none (ever since I made the switch). I have emailed them countless times to update their systems with my new format and pages. But they don't. So I lost them. I don't want to lose google. I usually get a lot of image / google searches since my site is so photo heavy. damn... I knew that structure was wrong. well, I am going to start looking to see if there is any magic that can be done with wordpress. thank you to all of you. Vera
all of mischa posts aren't in the mischa folder but they are categorized mischa-barton. so it would be better if it was mischa-barton/postname.html BUT here is another issue... Sometimes (more than not), a post will have multiple categories. So the URL will just have one category name even though it speaks about many others. ....
It´s just PHP, you can recode or ask someone recode it for you, I am not familiar with wordpress, but I suppose it´s matter of minutes.
You may have to use .htaccess rewrite as well in order to not loose the earlier links indexed in Google. If you do not do 301 redirect then you will lose all the index pages. This is a big task for a site with very high number of pages. But you will have to do it 301 redirect or let go the indexed pages.