WordPress permalinks for maximum SEO

When fresh content is king, dated writing is stale. That means making your site’s URLs indicate the year, month, and/or date of a post’s publication is a bad idea.

Google gives priority to recent posts  more than ever, so you should only use post names and possibly category names in your WordPress permalink URLs. Previously there was a performance loss incurred in WordPress if you did this, but with the release of WordPress 3.3 that is no longer the case. Yoast has all the details and a handy tool to help you switch out your old dated URLs and boost your SEO.

Despite having given this advice, I think it’s a bit unfortunate because URLs that indicate dates are providing some valuable information about the content and organization of a site. This is good to have, and age (or openness about it) really ought not be punished. More importantly, the recent changes in the Google search algorithm that favor recency are not really helpful for searchers in a lot of scenarios, like “what’s the best…” questions where it’s the authoritativeness and quality of an answer that really determines what you want to know.

Older posts are often the best ones in these cases, or critical to review in light of more recent views. “What’s the best plugin for Y? What’s the best way to do Y in CSS?” Often there is a “classic” post (or three) out there that really explains the issue best. More recent posts may provide insight as to how the classic answer is being modified or challenged, or they may just be freshness bait.  I’m afraid we’ll see a lot more freshness bait now and less of the classic way that knowledge is sifted and winnowed — by recognition of classic authorities on the one hand and new challengers trying to join their ranks or displace a predecessor.

Posted under: An inch wide and a mile deep on December 19, 2011 by Dan    No Comments

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