[wp-hackers] Some Thoughts/Enhancement Ideas In And Around The Category Side Of Things

[mccormicky]

My dad constantly writes posts with very long -upwards of 20 words- post
titles and he has page rank 5, the highest of all my sites I maintain,
 using permalink structure /%post_id%/%postname%/  w/  "category"  -category
base - default.
His site PR proves it doesn't seem to matter how long the url is or how far
it is from the root or whatever.
To me,anyway.

"Shorter URLs don't need shrinkers as often so are better able to retain
brand via click through."

Might be a dumb question but what does that mean?


On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net>wrote:

> On Feb 10, 2010, at 2:05 PM, Otto wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Mike Schinkel
> > <mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> >> On Feb 10, 2010, at 10:13 AM, Otto wrote:
> >>> I find it amazing, and more than a little humorous, at how far people
> >>> will go just because they don't want the word "category" in their URL.
> >>
> >> One important consideration, the deeper the path structure the less
> likely Google will rank the page highly in search results.  FWIW.
> >
> > You are mistaken. Sorry. Google doesn't care about paths or total URL
> > length. It *does* care about the last part of the path, and that
> > should always be your post-name, because Google parses those words and
> > uses them as keywords for the post.
> >
> >
> > But don't take my word for it, ask Matt Cutts.
>
>
> I don't take Matt's comments on face value, I take the evidence I've
> generated from testing. From testing there is a significant difference for
> each level of path depth (>10%.)
>
> OTOH, I would be interested to read his comments on that topic.  I googled
> and can't find.  Can you provide a link?
>
> > That said, shorter URLs do tend to get more clicks from search
> > engines.
>
> Ignoring that debate, shorter URLs are better in many contexts. Shorter
> URLs don't need shrinkers as often so are better able to retain brand via
> click through.
>
> Bottom line, a site publisher will be better off if they have control to
> optimize their URL structure.  One of WordPress' biggest current weaknesses
> is the difficulty of control URL structure.
>
> -Mike
> P.S. I've studies URL design in depth, see my blog from a few years back:
> http://blog.welldesignedurls.org
>
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