[wp-hackers] is it a good idea to remove the category base?

[IC IC]

I'm sorry for not making my question clear, though I do appreciate all
answers as far as the SEO aspect is concerned.

I was more on the performance side.

After reading Otto's article (
http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/,
), I thought removing the categories will have some impact. Please
answer this question for a site that has about 200 cats and 100 pages
or so.

When the cat base is missing, how would WP will interpret the order?
Is that a page? or a cat? Isn't more work to do? Or was it going to
check all the cats anyway so it would not matter anyway...

IN the ASP world, request.queryString, request.cookies, request.post
etc.... are the recommended way of getting the user input. but asp
allows me to go request("firstname"). by default, it would first look
into the query string, so it is safe and there is no performance trade
offf, if I was interested getting the first name from a qs. but if the
firstname was being submitted via form post, then asp would have
wasted some cycles going thru request.querystring collection before it
seeks the variable in the form collection.

Since I'm new to WP, is there a similat issue here? if cats are
omitted from the base, would it ever matter at all as far as permalink
resolutions?

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 6:17 PM, David Law
<wp-hackers at google-adsense-templates.co.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Dec 2011 15:27:09 -0800, you wrote:
>
>>The codex has this to say about Category base and Tag base
>>
>><quote>
>>The Category base and Tag base are prefixes used in URLs for category
>>and tag archives, which look like this:
>>
>> example.net/wp/category_base/category_name
>> example.net/wp/tag_base/tag_name
>>
>>The default values for these are category and tag. You can change
>>them, but you can't remove them from the URLs altogether.
>></quote>
>>
>>But we all know that there are plugins that let you overcome this
>>limitation allowing you to remove the category base, the question is
>>SHOULD WE?
>
> Everything below is talking pure SEO, there are other factors to
> consider.
>
> From an SEO perspective all words within a URL have an SEO impact, but
> not a massive amount, one non-SEO'd word isn't something to loose
> sleep over.
>
> Ideally a URL would be the main SERP a page is targeting and maybe a
> few related keywords.
>
> Having a base category and tag word can be a negative, but also a
> positive depending on the site.
>
> For a highly niche site where most posts are about one subject it
> makes sense to change the category and tag base to a relevant keyword
> or two. For example the site in my sig the category base is changed to
> /seo/ since pretty much every page on the site is related to SEO.
>
> If it's a site with diverse content you can use a hyphen (-) if you
> don't want to use a plugin. Google considers a hyphen as a seperator
> (a space) so is basically SEO neutral in this context.
>
> For SEO reasons I tend to only use categories and not tags, they are
> pretty much the same output wise so not much point using both. So have
> never had a site where I have to worry about changing both the
> category and tag base, on the rare site I use tags (never many of
> them) I leave the tag base as tag. If you had to get rid of both you
> could use an underscore (_) for the tag base.
>
> Don't make these changes on indexed sites, you'll damage your SERPs.
>
> Included this info in one of my WordPress SEO Tutorials
> http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress/seo-friendly-wordpress-permalinks
>
> I've considered using a plugin to remove them, but that means your
> category/tag URLs could clash with your static Page URLs or even Post
> URLs if you use /%postname% for your permalinks setting. So on my
> WordPress sites (got about 90) I've used a relevant keyword or hyphen
> instead, also means there's no chance of performance issues removing
> them.
>
> Works for me, my sites recieve tens of thousands of search engine
> visitors a day :-)
>
> David
> --
> http://www.stallion-theme.com/ Stallion WordPress SEO Theme
> http://www.stallion-theme.com/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin Stallion
> WordPress SEO Plugin
>
>
>>For some reason, I sense that this kind of a modification would effect
>>the performance and may cause odd behavior.
>>Any comment-|insight appreciated ?
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