News Source: http://www.weberz.com
Published: Jun 11, 2009 - 09:27 am
Story Found By: searchcommander 1076 Days ago
Category: SEM
After reading this, and then researching it for myself at WordPress.org, it DOES appear that there was a change to WordPress that makes my standard recommendations, ummm... lets call it, "less than optimal".
The post is very well researched and documented, and as a result, I’ll likely be changing the default behavior of my Core Tweaks plugin.
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Thanks, Scott - even though a lot of folks (including Matt Cutts) need to update our content
So what do we do to clean up our permalink structure? Hundreds of 301 redirects?
<div>I have been doing links the “good” way without much thought, but I have to question the premise of the “code count” – for lines of code. I must be missing something here. I disabled my wp cache (supercache – which does have additional lines of code in my .htaccess) and looked at the MySQL queries that actually pulls a post and dumped them to a log. If I have the post name AND post ID in ANY ORDER the SQL query is:</div><div></div><div>SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_name = ’stupidest-web-domains’ AND wp_posts.ID = 41 AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC</div><div></div><div>If I have just the ID, I get:</div><div></div><div>SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 wp_posts.ID = 41 AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC</div><div></div><div>Finally, if I do something like /%category%/%postname% I get:</div><div></div><div>SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_name = ’stupidest-web-domains’ AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC</div><div></div><div>Note that the category name is stripped away. In my opinion, this single AND has minimal inpact – and the wp_options table is properly indexed. Unless we were talking about tens of thousands of rows in your db, the different between these permalink schemes is almost unmeasurable. Given the variations of cache plugins, widgets, etc I cannot imagine any benefit whatsoever performance-wise of one scheme over the other – with the obvious exception of creating schemes that results in two posts having identical URLs.</div><div></div><div></div><div>This means that /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname% and /%category%/%postname% execute the exact same SQL query to get the page.</div><div></div><div></div><div>So what am I missing?</div>
I may be not an SEO expert (I’m more into SEO 2.0 ;-) but I gave this advice long ago, albeit for different reasons:http://seo2.0.onreact.com/seo-20-basics-wordpress-url-designNonetheless it’s bad style to write how bad others are just because you have some new or exclusive info others may have lacked back in the day.
@ChristinaGleason changing permalinks takes care of the redirewcts in WP2.7x - but i’m not changing now after all.I personally do NOT want dates (or even numbers) in my URL’s so i’m going to suffer whatever minor performance hit that it may take, and i’ll assume WP will fix the bug in a future version. @onreact - for the record, I’m not offended by them saying i was giving "bad advice", and didn’t think it was "bad style" - that’s why I Sphunn it! On the contrary, i thought it was cleverly styled, great linkbait, and I hold no ill will at all towards the author. He got some serious bigwigs commenting on his post that gives everyone food for thought - very nicely done, IMO