Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
/%category%/%postname%/ Permalink structure
-
Mostly everyone seems to agree that /%category%/%postname%/ is the best blog structure.
I'm thinking of changing my structure to that because now it's structured by date which is bad. But almost all of my posts are assigned to more than one category. Won't this create duplicate pages?
-
Thanks!
-
Did you find any reason of site declining?
Send me an url, I will take a look

-
Yes, our positions are gradually declining, and I'm trying everything I can, no matter how seemingly small, until I can figure out why.
-
Hi again

I think that depends on what is the position of your site now. If it's good there is no pressure to do changes in other case you can take a risk. In my opinion good structure of content help in SEO an if I were in your situation i would take a risk of change.
-
Another question is which would be worse for SEO: leaving it the way it is, categorized by month and date, or changing the whole structure when I have dozens of posts?
-
Thanks for the input. The reason I'm worried about duplicate pages is because what i temporarily switched everything to category/postname, I could access pages many different ways.
category1/postname/page
category2/postname/page
anothercategory/postname/page
Were all the same page. Duplicate content?
-
I agree with Marek. However, there's value in having the Category in there specially if your categories are keyword rich. Don't worry about duplicate pages. One post will only have one default category in the Slug (Most of the times, its the 1st one you selected in Wordpress). I also sometimes like to use /%category%/%postname%.html or /%category%/%postname%.php which gives the effect of pages under a folder, vs folder inside a folder. Just my 2c.
-
Hi Marisa,
I'm using /%postname% and in my opinion it is a best structure ... but ... in that kind of structure is important to care about slug and to prevent creation of duplicated titles.
/the-best-solution is a good slug
//the-best-solution-2 is not a good slug
I don't have duplicated pages cos WordPress has mechanism which check the slug in real time when you creating a post.
I think that /%postname% is the most friendly link structure.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advice on redirects for a category I want to reuse.
Hi, We have a current category set up that is starting to rank OK but we are going through a site re-build and this category URL will now better describe a new category of products. My dilemma is if I 301 redirect the current url to my new category I won't be able to use the URL for the new one. But if I don't redirect it will the pages that have already been ranked under this url then confuse customers and search engines. For example - Products and sub-categories under the URL /personalised-toys will now become /personalised-toys-for-boys but I want to use the /personalised-toys URL for a different set of sub categories and products. Any assistance or ideas or just definitely don't do it in a particular way would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neil_stickergizmo0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Paragraphs/Tables for Content & SEO
Hi Does anyone know if Google prefers paragraphs over content in a table, or doesn't it make much difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Intro to programming/coding for seo
Hello, I am currently a SEO and am looking for an Intro to programming/coding course to help me implement various technical SEO tasks for my clients and the business-as the programming dept will not help me, as they do not see the value of SEO. Could someone pls recommend an online course that would introduce me to basic concepts and also specifically, the information that would help me to enhance our SEO? I would also like to better understand APIs. Thanks so much in advance for your help! Lauren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Change url structure and keeping the social media likes/shares
Hi guys, We're thinking of changing the url structure of the tutorials (we call it knowledgebase) section on our website. We want to make it shorter URL so it be closer to the TLD. So, for the convenience we'll call them old page (www.domain.com/profiles/profile_id/kb/article_title) and new page (www.domain.com/kb/article_title) What I'm looking to do is change the url structure but keep the likes/shares we got from facebook. I thought of two ways to do it and would love to hear what the community members thinks is better. 1. Use rel=canonical I thought we might do a rel=canonical to the new page and add a "noindex" tag to the old page. In that way, the users will still be able to reach the old page, but the juice will still link to the new page and the old pages will disappear from Google SERP and the new pages will start to appear. I understand it will be pretty long process. But that's the only way likes will stay 2. Play with the og:url property Do the 301 redirect to the new page, but changing the og:url property inside that page to the old page url. It's a bit more tricky but might work. What do you think? Which way is better, or maybe there is a better way I'm not familiar with yet? Thanks so much for your help! Shaqd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content. Example http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WizardOfMoz
wil be redirected to
http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/ Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route? Thanks.0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0