This is driving me crazy, I would love some advice... I manage blog/web magazine with 50+ volunteer writers, we have a ton of categories and a lot of posts daily. At first I thought it would be a good idea to add a keyword to every URL. So our first URL structure was: (first 6 weeks) :www.domain.com/keyword/category/postname I soon realized that because we have so many categories, all of them with child categories that the URL's were huge... domain.com/keyword/category1/childcategory/postname So I used the permalink migration plugin to change to help change our URL to: (last 3 months) domain.com/category1/childcategory/postname The editor and writers are now telling me they want to rearrange the categories and do some temporary features e.g. a series of posts on one subject. Considering this, I get the feeling the categories could and will be changing in the future, especially if the traffic keeps growing. As such, I think I should change the category structure to something that isn't going to keep being changed whenever their is a redesign or change in structure. I was thinking: www.domain.com/mm/dd/yy/postname There are a LOT of posts and a lot of them are on the same broad subject each day, so the chance of repeated postname's are not tiny. Questions: 1) Can you think of a better URL to go to that is going to be robust to change in the future and I can be confident we can stay with for the long term. 2) How would you manage the URL change, I have 4 months worth of content sitting there with inbound links to certain URL's. I could use the permalink structure plugin, and hope that the first 6 weeks have no migrated (you can only use it for one structure change. 3) Should I be monitoring google webmaster tools for 404's and If I do find them what should I do with the not found URL? I really appreciate the help, this is driving me up the wall.
At the very least if you're going to change your URL structure (which you should never do unless you're 100% certain that you're going to stick with it for the long term), you'll want to do some 301 redirects from the old URls to the new ones - this will not only prevent 404 errors from showing up, but will also pass along PageRank and other goodies (such as traffic) to the page's new location. You also want to keep your URL structure as short as possible - no more than 2 or 3 levels deep. This isn't just for SEO reasons, but also for usability purposes - do you honestly think that people are going to easily remember long directory structures? I know I can't. And date based structures make this even worse (which is why I NEVER use a date structure except on personal journals). It sounds to me like you really need to consider the information and site architecture aspects of your site first, and plan for the long haul (3-5 years) here. What categories do you see being added to the blog, how can the content be structured to fit within your category structure, and can you do it without breaking the existing setup as it is, or if need be, use the occasional 301 redirect to point visitors and spiders to the right location if something does get moved?
I appreciate the cerebral response, I admit that the idea of being to plan three to five years ahead seems intangible at best. Changes in categories, features, new series of posts, topical events et al all make me feel that it would be disingenuous to say I had a solid road-map of the site's future, it covers far too broad a range of subjects to be neatly planned. If it were a narrow demographic I would be more confident, however it is not. I feel the simplest would be domain.com/postname However my concern is repeated titles/urls; let us say we were analyzing this problem with Engadget.com, and I as the editor tell you that I want to start running regular features. E.g. Daily roundups: "Worse press releases today" | "The Morning Interview" | "24 hours in dugg down digg comments" Weekly roundups: "Fridays: this weeks best comments" "This week in Blu-Ray" "This week in keyboards" Poor examples but the affect is there, it would be easy to see repeated urls. Wordpress amends duplicates by adding a number. So the second week would be: domain.com/worse-press-releases-today-2 domain.com/the-morning-interview-2 And so on and so forth. I see two options; 1) Add a date domain.com/mm/dd/yy/%postname% 2) Add topical content to the title e.g. domain.com/this-week-in-bluray-indies-back-with-the-crystal-skull 1) Is undesirable due to it being so deep and unattractive on a human level 2) We run the risk of repeated URLs only differentiated by a trailing number. I have little faith in writers understanding or caring about the SEO implications. I would genuinely appreciate further discussion on this, I find it interesting as well as a huge headache. I should also add that the site in debate has 50+ non tech savvy writers, so the whole process has to be robust and reliable/automated.
I like the idea of adding a date to the url. It will prevent repeats, it's easy on the eyes, and it actually adds info to the url (it tells me when the article was written very quickly). I see urls with dates in them all the time, and I have no problem with it. P.S. I wouldn't want your "job". lol
Rand Fishkin told me that these factors play a small part unless you have millions of URLS floating around on the web... However out of the options I presented he said his favorite would be... domain.com/mm-dd-yy/post-title
well, update: i ended up going with just domain.com/post-title and it seems to have done me right for about 98% of relevant search terms (e.g. search for the title of the post, etc.). i think Rand is right.