Newly Acquired Website--Questions on Changing Permalink Structure
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I just acquired a new website. The domain is about 7 years old with around 1000 indexed pages in google. Decent domain authority at 34, PR 4, a lot of inbound links.
The thing that's driving me crazy is the permalink structure--set up as month/post name in wordpress http://xxxxxxx.com/2015/01/sample-post/
Based on my experience and I could be wrong, but I would think that the structure would be more effective with just post name and no date.
Am I absolutely insane at this point to try and change it?
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There are many times where I would take something similar to Scott's tact. I agree as well, he mentioned some good general practices. But this site has been in the wild for a bit and you just acquired it.
This means there's a good bit of homework to do before overhauling the entire permalink structure, for what I suspect is a considerable number of pages/posts. Knowing nothing else, the safest opinion I can render is to keep the structure as is for existing pages/posts (current traffic/link/revenue considerations) - and consider a custom post type and custom permalink workaround ('Sperimenting! Woooo!) for fun and profit(?). Your developer, or the WP development community, may have a better solution.
Though I generally tend to disagree with doing things simply because the competition is doing the same. If nothing else, the mentality tends to bleed over into everything. Just think of all the wasted time/opportunities. Some differentiation can be a good thing.
But if the custom permalink URLs tend to out-perform the slightly-lesser-than-pretty URLs over time, you can do a cost/benefit of total URL permalink change. (Rewrites... rewrites as far as the eye can see... buzzlightyear.jpg) But yeah, you'll probably have to confront the previous posts/pages permalinks at some time. I'm just saying confront the issue with some primary data, with the aid of secondary data.
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Hmm...two contrasting opinions!! What do i do? While I agree with Samuel's general comments, Travis i tend to agree with you. Especially since all the top ranking competitors are doing the same thing.
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My general rule as far as URLs is twofold:
1. They should reflect a logical hierarchy separated by website topics, functions, and whatnot.
2. They should be a short as possible because shorter URLs are viewed with more credibility, they are remembered more often, and they are clicked more often in SERPs. (See some Moz resources on URLs here and here.)
In your example, I would included a /blog/ layer as in website.com/blog/sample-post/ because the blog's "main page" is a second-level page in this hypothetical example:
Home Page
- About
- Products
- Blog
- Contact
Yes, I'd take out the date (Google knows when you published something). I hope this helps!
Edit: Oh, just be sure to 301 (permanent) -- not 302 (temporary) -- redirect each URL to the new one!
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I'll start with: Leave the existing URLs alone!!!
With the current permalink structure, you're possibly getting a slight page load speed boost. Apparently it's easier for WP to query and return a URL with numbers. I don't really understand how the speed boost happens, since everything has a numeric ID# anyway until the URLs become Pretty, so yeah.... there's that.
If we had our druthers, you and I, everything would be page-name post-name. It looks cleaner, it's easier to read and remember. Though in sports, information is time sensitive. The date in the URL would help a slightly savvier user know if you're talking about a game won in this season, rather than last season from the SERP.
This may be a little bit of a workaround, and I'm not a WP developer (I can muddle along and play until I get in trouble.) but you can make a custom post type with a custom permalink. That way, the old URLs stay the same and anything new can be done the way you seem fit. I'm not sure about your level of comfort with the guts of WP, but here's something you can repurpose or show to a dev: Custom Post Type - Custom Permalink Tut
Best of luck.
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I should also mention this is a sports related website, where it might be viewed that having the date in the permalink is a way of identifying how old the website is. I have examined a few other much larger higher ranking competitors and they are using the same permalink structure.
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