Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs

In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink 

If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.

An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.

Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420

Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/category/post-title

Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

best permalink structure in wordpress

So, how do you change the permalink structure in your wordpress blog to this optimal URL permalink structure?

How to change permalink structure in Wordpress

In Wordpress, go to Options and then select “Permalinks”. Then, click on the “Custom, specify below” option and in the custom structure, insert “/%category%/%postname%/ “. This will make your permalinks display the cateogory of that post and the post title right after your domain name.

Many people would suggest that you go with just the post name after your domain name. While this is a good option, you can make it even better by including the category as usually all cateogories are keywords. Another benefit is that the cateogory names are automatically listed in Technorati as Tags.

Another good option for a Wordpress permalink structure is the

http://www.example.com/year/month/day/post-name

However, I think the date is not that important. Try to write timeless articles for your blog. Moreover, if you get lazy and ignore your blog for a while, say someone is searching for something on Google, even though your article might provide the answer, having a 2005/04 in the URL might make the user not click the article. So ignore the date part in the URL. 

There are a lot more options in Wordpress. Following is the list of Structure Tags you can use with a Wordpress Permalink structure

%year% :  The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum% :  Month of the year, for example 05
%day% :  Day of the month, for example 28
%hour% : Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute% : Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second% :  Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname% : A sanitized version of the title of the post. So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes “this-is-a-great-post” in the URI 
%post_id%: The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%: A sanitized version of the category name. Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author% : A sanitized version of the author name.

These types of permalinks work on most systems without any problems, but there are still some conditions where problems occur.

Help !!! I have hundreds of articles in my blog and I wish to change the permalink structure without breaking any links

You need to use the Permalink Migration for a WordPress Blog using the 301 Permanent redirect.  Here, using the plugin mentioned in that post, we will tell the search engines and visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked a post on your blog using the year/month/date/postname permalink structure and redirect them to the same post but with the new permalink structure. Best part, search engines love it and you also transfer your page rank to the blog post with the new permalink structure.

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76 Responses to “Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs”

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  1. 51
    CD wallets Says:

    They say that it’s a beta, something they are still fixing and changing, and renovating. So maybe blogger beta? I don’t know.

  2. 52
    Ali (Quick|Weight|Loss|Diets) Says:

    i think “%postname%/” is better than “/%category%/%postname%/ ” because if we change category it does not create 404 error.

  3. 53
    Hikari Says:

    Permalink parsing doesn’t check which category it is. Once it identifies the string as a category slug, it moves on, so you can freely change categories and permalink will remain.

    What you can’t do is delete the category, but in this case any resource you delete generates 404s.

  4. 54
    Komodo Dragons Says:

    I use this custom structure as well. =D

  5. 55
    online sites Says:

    Hi very nice post telling about Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs thanks fore great sharing.

  6. 56
    photo frame Says:

    See the official post on the WordPress Blog for details, but the thing I’m excited about testing out is this WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity.

  7. 57
    SEO link vine Says:

    I think the words you choose to include in the URL, meta description, and page title are more important than the format of the URL. However, I have heard that keeping directories to one or two sub-directories is good and that search engines will ignore sub-directories that are greater than seven levels deep.

  8. 58
    SEO link vine Says:

    Permanence in links is desirable when content items are likely to be linked to, from, or cited by a source outside the originating organization. Before the advent of large-scale dynamic websites built on database-backed content management systems…

  9. 59
    commercial mortgages Says:

    At my SEO and Marketing blog I’m using the SEO mod for wordpress and for the Permalink structure I’m using, /%postname%/ and it seems to be working well!

  10. 60
    unique gifts for men Says:

    I intentionally leave mine off in WordPress… it seemed to make the URL too long, and for most posts the date is irrelevant.

  11. 61
    black celebs Says:

    Sign: wdpad Hello!!! ybwsn and 3296qykdtteksa and 2786 : I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz its really helpful.

  12. 62
    Laptop Offers Says:

    /%postname%/ is better , but according to Google (Matt Cuts) it doesn’t make any difference

  13. 63
    unique gifts for men Says:

    The only time I’d recommend the numeric structure is if you think that your blog might someday get picked up by Google News. In that case either use the post number as the permalink…

  14. 64
    Music news Says:

    Hi..i am a new, to word press development. it is a Good share..thanks for useful post..

  15. 65
    Music news Says:

    Thanks for beautiful blog sharing all is very nice and also lovely.

  16. 66
    college loans online Says:

    You are right about this one. Its too bad I figured this out only about a month ago. At least it is fixed now though.

  17. 67
    Tej Kohli Says:

    Now with the Wordpress 3.0.1 some extra features are also added

  18. 68
    free reverse email Says:

    Permalink parsing doesn’t check which category it is. Once it identifies the string as a category slug, it moves on, so you can freely change categories and permalink will remain.

    What you can’t do is delete the category, but in this case any resource you delete generates 404s.

  19. 69
    ijalab Says:

    nice one

    ijalab.com

  20. 70
    Schedule Says:

    Best you should edit the webpage subject Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs | TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO to something more generic for your blog post you make. I enjoyed the blog post all the same.

  21. 71
    Sarah Says:

    I was looking for some help regarding Social Engine Permalink Structures and how can we improve or change the way they show.

    Any help?

  22. 72
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  23. 73
    Tomeka Bridenbecker Says:

    I’ve read several good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how much effort you put to make such a fantastic informative site.

  24. 74
    Job centre online Says:

    nice post….very useful…

  25. 75
    Project Management Wordpress Plugin Says:

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  26. 76
    Diana Says:

    Can u give me the exact structure of the google algorithm. Because i had read in an article tat google had reversed the structure for 2012 PR update….

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