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After previously deriding the pretty permalinks mantra, I have finally decided to drink the “Kool-Aid.”  Although I’m still not convinced it will make any difference in search engine rankings, I do see the value of pretty permalinks in overall site design and organization.  There are two primary reasons I’ve decided to change the default permalink structure, neither of which have anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO).  The first, and most important, concerns how manually entered links back to my blog appear to potential readers.  The second involves the limitations imposed on site hierarchy when using the default permalink structure.

Recently I received a burst of traffic from a reference citation on the popular tech site, Experts Exchange.  When I went to the source to check on what it was all about, the referenced link back to my site was not very pretty; in fact it was downright ugly!  The link supplied by the poster at Experts Exchange was in response to a previous question asked by a user.  It was simply -

also here:
http://www.os.com/?p=9

For a search engine result, this link isn’t an issue, as the results page will include the post title and a brief content snippet.  But for a manually entered link, the reader’s experience isn’t quite the same.  The default permalink doesn’t provide the potential reader with any incentive to click through to the article.  The URL is totally generic and non-descriptive and for all they know, it could be a spam link.  This was something I hadn’t considered.  In the past I was only looking at how search engines would view the URLs, not people.  Unless all one is interested in is ad clicks, a blog should be written for people, not computers.  This alone was enough to convince me to change the permalinks.

The other reason has more to do with overall design considerations than anything else.  I’ve been thinking of expanding the site with additional content and was contemplating moving the blog one level lower in the site hierarchy.  While I could easily re-install WordPress in a sub-directory, doing so would require an additional content management system for the non-blog portion of the site.  I like WordPress and it works fairly well as a CMS.  I have no desire to add yet another management layer to the site.  With WordPress, simply changing the permalink structure is an easy and effective way to push the blog content down a level without the need for a major re-design.  So now that I’ve decided the ugly permalinks needed to go, all that is left is to decide on the optimal permalink format.

There are literally hundreds of posts detailing the ongoing debate over the best permalink structure.  Most of these debates revolve around search engine optimization.  As I have stated before, I don’t believe SEO considerations are germane to a URL formatting decision. Your permalink structure decision should be based on how people interact with your site, not search engines.  Although there are several popular formats that are sound from a design standpoint, in practice they could be technically troublesome.

One popular format is the /%category%/%postname%/ structure.  While this method looks good at first, it suffers from two potential problems.  First, if you ever decide to change your category structure, or move your posts between categories, it will cause havoc with both links on search engines and referring sites.  Second, if your categories contain sub-categories, or your posts are listed in multiple categories, you may experience unpredictable URL paths.  The category WordPress will use is not necessarily the category you want.  WordPress will select the category with the lowest category ID.  Remember, pretty permalinks are the result of the rewrite engine.  WordPress still uses the ugly permalinks internally.

The other method, and I believe the most popular one, is simply using /%postname%/.  From a people standpoint this is the simplest and most descriptive URL.  It does, however, lock your blog at the root of the site.  In my previous post I stated this was good thing, but that was before I decided I wanted to add additional non-blog content to the site.  My preference now is for flexibility as well as readability.  So long as your posts aren’t buried in what looks like a long directory path, having your blog at the second level of your site shouldn’t be a problem for search engines or people.

There is also one other format that I have recently seen that is based on /%post_id%/%postname%/.  I’m not sure what to make of this design.  Creating a URL that contains a unique post ID as a path element doesn’t seem to serve any practical purpose.  It can also hinder user interaction with the site.  How often have you been on a site and manually edited the URL in the browser bar to navigate back to a previous directory?  Using /%post_id%/ in the path makes this type of navigation impossible.

After debating the pros and cons of the various link formats, it came down to either /articles/%postname%/ or /blog/%postname%/.  I decided on /blog/%postname%/ for a couple of reasons.  Having the word “articles” in the URL path is descriptive, but not necessarily accurate.  An article is really something different than a blog post.  Articles are generally longer and more formal.  I felt the posts here, although some are long, are not technically articles.  Blog is a much better description.

Readers identify blogs with dynamic Web 2.0 content.  Articles are static in nature, more like reference material.  Selecting /blog/%postname%/ seemed like it fits both my structure and design requirements.  Now the only thing left to do is to make sure I haven’t created lots of duplicate content.  One of the major advantages of the default structure is that it helps reduce duplicate content which will definitely affect SEO.  Now that I’ve changed link structure, I need to be more aware of the potential for duplicates.

As the content is now available through multiple URLs, I needed a way to control how search bots indexed the site.  I decided on using the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk as it provides granular control over what and how the site is indexed.  This seems a little less ham-handed than messing with the traditional robots.txt.

So now, after eating crow, I’m ready to implement the new structure.  I hope I will not feel the need to switch it back because that will make a real mess with search engines, RSS feeds and manually entered links.  Changing your permalink structure from the default is something you only want to do once.