I have recently discovered a common problem – using %postname% permalinks. This has long been the recommendation from SEO experts to optimize our posts. (90% is a very carefully crafted number straight from my experience + imagination)
The Symptoms of using the wrong permalink structure
This becomes a problem as your site grows. The more Pages you add, the more visitors you get, the more resources your site will use. If your site needs more resources than your host currently allows, your site will freeze, crash, and could even be suspended.
What problems can a postname permalink cause?
If you have %postname% permalinks (or category or tag or author) WordPress activates “verbose rewrite urls” (see this article for a more thorough explanation: http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/)
Simple explanation of the Cause
custom permalink structure %postname% + many Pages (capital “P” for a Page, not a post)
How to Fix the Permalink Structure
Change the permalink to blog/$postname%/ (or any other static word like “articles” or dynamic date like %year%)
Frequently Asked Questions
What will happen to post urls?
Oddly enough it is the POSTS’s urls that will change – NOT the Pages’ urls. For example, Http://myblog.com/this-is-my-post will become http://myblog.com/blog/this-is-my-post (or http://myblog.com/2010/this-is-my-post).
What will happen to Page urls
- nothing (same with category, tag, or author pages)
Is there another SEO -favorable permalink structure?
We’ve been told lately that the way we SHOULD set up our blogs is %postname%. I, along with many others believe this isn’t the case. Perhaps once it was – but I doubt it will affect the google ranking too much to have the year or ‘blog’ word in the url.
Others say that your use of correct markup is more important ie: using “headers” from the drop-down menu in the text editor. And it seems to make sense – the more correct your mark up is, the easier for search engine spiders to crawl the site. So use headers, titles on your links and images, and your SEO will improve (if you dont already do that). But, SEO is not really a science yet – google does not hand over their algorithm for ranking sites. And it is constantly evolving and getting better at beating the tricksters. So its all a guess! Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Why-why-why?
Ever wonder why WP doesn’t suggest the %postname% permalink? ~ you have to write it yourself under “custom” structure. It is not recommended for good reason – those folks know how WordPress will process all those links, and they know that if you select that permalink structure you’re in for trouble. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain why, but the only way for WP to handle your permalinks in those four cases(postname, author, category or tag) is to use “verbose rewrite rules”.
What are Verbose Rewrite Rules and why do I care?
If you have your permalinks set to postname, author, tag or category you will trigger verbose rewrite rules. For other permalink structures the entire site’s rewrite rules are composed of about 10 lines of code. With a verbose rewrite rules triggered, every Page on your site needs its own list of rules (approx 11 lines). If you have less than 50 WP Pages, it isn’t a noticeable problem. If you have approx. 50 or more WP Pages, this creates a problem for the server – and you’ll need your own VPS or dedicated server (at a high cost) to be able to process all of these urls.
For more information – ask questions in the forums, or purchase a help ticket.
I don’t think this will effect much more.
I appreciate your knowledge and your help! Thank you!