Shortening URLs case study
A recent article in Search Engine Land’s blog got me thinking about refining Wordpress’s URL structure. When writing blog posts Wordpress creates a link structure like so (provided you uploaded .htaccess and set permalink structure correctly):
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/
What Search Engine Land’s case study reveals is that the above URL is less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates:
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/
What’s interesting is that Google’s spam expert, Matt Cutts, and SEObook’s, Aaron Wall, implement this URL structure as well. So clearly this is the correct URL structure when blogging.
I’ve gone and done the same to WebGrowth’s blog, it’ll be interesting to see how it affects the click through rate and SEO of the URLs.
I modified the permalink settings within wordpress:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
to the following:
/%postname%/
I also made sure to activate Alex King’s 404 plugin, which emails me whenever a “not-found (404)” error is generated on my site. It is always a good idea to activate this plugin whenever you make any structural changes to your blog, as it will help identify any errors you may have created.
I also added a 301 redirection plugin so I can make the changes manually.
It will take a while for the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN to re-index your blog, one must realise that you may lose page strength of previous URLs but for the longterm this is a better way to structure your URLs.
From a SEO perspective it is also good because you will have less “fluff” in your URL i.e. no more dates, now the URL is more focused on the keywords within the URL.