Wordpress Permalink Structure
-
A quick Wordpress Permalink checkup...
I'm generally a fan of %postname% Permalink structure in Wordpress - although this does create a completely flat architecture, so that ALL Pages AND Posts are found at www.domain.com/_________
I'm sure I've heard, read, or ingested somewhere that it makes more sense to use /blog/%postname% which then makes all Blog Posts reside at www.domain.com/blog/________ with the static Page content still being at www.domain.com/________
Any thoughts to why this would NOT be a good idea?
To me this seems more logical.. and like I say I'm sure I've heard an authority say Google kind of prefers that it can differentiate Blog content from everything else. I've used this successfully on a few sites so far, and all seems to be good. (Moz although not Wordpress, uses this structure for it's blog).
Thanks!
-
Greg
Awesome! Glad the mozinar is a valuable resource! Gotta love grumpy cat memes
-Dan
-
Hi Dan, thanks for your answer. Funny, I was actually going to mention you in my question, as I watched your Mozinar before and agreed with your whole permalinks structure info you mentioned during the webinar - albeit you favour the date format for blog posts, as you use for www.evolvingseo.com.
It's good to know that I'm on the right track with my set-up. I feel better for that.
p.s. Your Mozinar has has proven to be an invaluable resource for Wordpress SEO, so thanks very much for that. I particularly liked the grumpy cat and mention him whenever there's a conversation about indexing Tags haha!
Cheers,
Greg
-
Greg
I agree with you in 95% of cases, and talked about that in my WordPress Moizinar (slides 13-15). Also see screenshot of what I like for URL structure on your basic WordPress setup (that is a site with a blog in it - typical company/agency site for example).
The only case where I like putting the blog posts right at the root level are if the site is literally only a blog, with like an about page as the only "page" and that's it. In that case I think this works fine.
-Dan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is Wordpress Website Backup Service Worth the Investment?
I was horrified to learn that my hosting company, InMotion Hosting does not offer redundant backups, that it is on the customer to set up backups to ensure they don't lose their data. I plan to back up to Google Drive 3 x a week for 12 backups and also create 3 backups on our server (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday). So if something goes wrong and we catch it within a week we can generate the backup directly from our server. There are website backup services such as BlogVault. Do they offer any meaningful advantages to taking the contents of the entire server (16 gigs) and backing it up? They do offer Malware removal. Does this have value? Is back up on an external service like Google Cloud while simultaneously backing up on the server a safe way to proceed? If not, what is the simplest and most effective manner to backup? I prefer to avoid adding any plugins to WordPress as our site already has too many (about 30). Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
How to Optimize With Wordpress SEO Plugin YOAST?
Hi Everyone, I am currently using Moz's page optimization format to improve our website's SEO. https://mathandmovement.com/ This is the format, these are all of the areas that we need to improve for each of our website's pages, according to Moz. include 3 keywords max: <url>www.mysite.com/my-keyword-phrase</url> <page title="">2 keywords max <title>Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword - Brand</title></page> 2 keywords max: keywords in my headers 2 keywords max: keywords in my headers ![keyword](image file) <focus keyword="">1 with YOAST</focus> We are currently using the free version of YOAST for our SEO. My question to you is this, will our pages still have good SEO if we use appropriate keywords (high monthly volume, below 40 difficulty ranking, High Organic CTR,) and put them in the format above? Or since the free version of YOAST only let's us optimize 1 keyword, will we still rank for the other two/three that we put in our meta and page titles/h1s, h2s, urls, and overall paragraph text? Please also let us know what we can do to improve our SEO! Thanks so much, Emma
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emmamathandmovement0 -
Best-practice URL structures with multiple filter combinations
Hello, We're putting together a large piece of content that will have some interactive filtering elements. There are two types of filters, topics and object types. The architecture under the hood constrains us so that everything needs to be in URL parameters. If someone selects a single filter, this can look pretty clean: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc
or
www.domain.com/project?object=typeOne The problems arise when people select multiple topics, potentially across two different filter types: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic-secondTopic-thirdTopic&object=typeOne-typeTwo I've raised concerns around the structure in general, but it seems to be too late at this point so now I'm scratching my head thinking of how best to get these indexed. I have two main concerns: A ton of near-duplicate content and hundreds of URLs being created and indexed with various filter combinations added Over-reacting to the first point above and over-canonicalizing/no-indexing combination pages to the detriment of the content as a whole Would the best approach be to index each single topic filter individually, and canonicalize any combinations to the 'view all' page? I don't have much experience with e-commerce SEO (which this problem seems to have the most in common with) so any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!0 -
Wordpress site, MOZ showing missing meta description but pages do not exist on backend
I've got a wordpress website (a client) and MOZ keeps showing missing meta descriptions. When I look at the pages these are nonsense pages, they do exist somewhere but I am not seeing them on the backend. Questions: 1) how do I fix this? Maybe it's a rel con issue? why is this referring to "non-sense" pages? When I go to the page there is nothing on it except maybe an image or the headline, it's very strange. Any input out there I greatly appreciate. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SOM240 -
Using WP All Import csv import plugin for wordpress to daily update products on large ecommerce site. Category naming and other issues.
We have just got an automated solution working to upload about 4000 products daily to our site. We get a CSV file from the wholesalers server each day and the way they have named products and categories is not ideal. Although most of the products remain the same (don't need to be over written) Some will go out of stock or prices may change etc. Problem is we have no control over the csv file so we need to keep the catagories they have given us. Might be able to create new catgories and have products listed under multiple categories? If anyone has used wp all import or has knoledge in this area please let me know. I have plenty more questions but this should start the ball rolling! Thanks in advance mozzers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weebro0 -
Wordpress Blogs and SEO
So far we have been creating separate blogs on wordpress.com for our sites, and writing there. Today I was told that there was better SEO hosting the blog on the actual domain. i.e. www.widgets.com/blog instead of widget.wordpress.com Is this true? Oddly I have had my WP beat my own URL on one account. So I am not sure if this is valid. Can someone tell me pros and cons of both? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?
I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information. All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain. Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen. Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy): href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143" I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO. Any advice?? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0