[wp-hackers] Permalink Structure - Performance vs. SEO

[Christopher Ross]

Matt Cutts did a lecture at WordCamp 2007 conference in San Francisco (available here http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/), I'll save you the hour long video and state that *at that time* the depth of the link did not matter.

As a result in the url http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/, Google virtually ignores the /2007/08/04/ for SEO purposes.

As for performance, the Codex page at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks  states:

"For performance reasons, it is *not* a good idea to start your permalink 
structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is 
that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your 
permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your 
Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), 
and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its 
database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced 
difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a 
numeric field, such as the year or post ID."

The general gist is that it's best to start with a number because WP query's the database based on what it finds in your permalink, in order. So, in the url above is would look for 2007, then 08, then 04 and finally find the post at matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers.

If however, the permalink had been http://onemansblog.com/122/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/ it would have looked for Post ID 122 and found the article (assuming that was the ID).

I assume those two things are still true (however, I'd love to be corrected if I'm wrong) so in summary, the position of the SEO friendly text in a permalink doesn't matter and the least number of SQL calls are generated by putting the ID first.

c.


On 2011-06-13, at 6:18 PM, Leo Baiano wrote:

> 
> SEO specialists to the list. It is possible to know what's more weight to a
> URL, when organizing the search results in order of relevance?




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Christopher Ross (cross at thisismyurl.com)
http://thisismyurl.com
WordPress Consulting, Design & Programming

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