Permalink Structure & User Comments

[finnegan]

From Day 4:

Although, I prefer this method myself, don't your pages take a bit of an SEO hit in the SERPS since your keyword is further away from the start of the URL than if you had used just domain.com/postname?

Also, I'm creating a news site that will probably start off with 3-4 categories. What structure do you suggest I use?

If you don't want to deal with Akismet, you could allow Facebook comments or Disqus. I'd go with Disqus before Facebook, and prefer neither due to their extreme impact on loading times. I want my users to go discuss my posts elsewhere where they can bring in more traffic, and I direct them to do so.

Where is this magical place you send them that brings in more traffic than your site? Are you directing them to your Facebook page to comment on articles there...or somewhere else?

 

[stackcash]

We are only going to use post-name slugs going forward. Getting rid of the category sub-directory.

Shorter URLs are preferred by Google. We just build the silo's manually instead of relying on WP's category function to do it for us.

Here's somewhat of a helpful article on the topic:

https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

 

[Ryuzaki]

It's up to you, your goals, the ultimate size of the site, user experience, etc.

If my site is going to remain small on a micro-niche, then I'd not use a category. But if I'm anticipating thousands of posts I want it for my sanity and the user's ability to glance and gain a ton of insight into how the site is built and how they can expect to navigate it.

On my main project, I actually have:

domain .com/category/sub-cat/post
​

That doesn't mean my keywords aren't close to the front either. It just takes meticulous planning. Here's an example and not how I do it, but similar.

InkPensDirect .com/ Reviews / Best / Ball-Points
​

Right there, you're talking about terms like Best Ball Point Ink Pens, Ball Point Ink Pen Reviews, on and on. You're going to take down all of the longer-tails and one-time type ins like this. It's better than InkPensDirect .com/Best-Ball-Point-Pen-Reviews in my mind for the reasons stated above. People know the "Best" sub-cat is probably Top 10 Lists and they can back up to Reviews and find individual reviews too.

Between this hyper-categorization, breadcrumbs, and interlinking, you'll overcome any loss of benefit by being the guy with the shortest URL. There's never a constant where there's one best way. It depends on the size of the site and how broad of topics it covers.

You could drop out the long URL and still do what @stackcash is saying and have 2 out of three possible silo-ing methods in place. Will exchanging one for shorter URLs be a boost or a loss? I don't know the algorithm that well and this is one of those splitting hairs places.

I think that NOT using your post name is a good idea though and using your main keyword phrase is fairly powerful though. Like:

domain .com/best-motorcycle-helmets-of-2016
​

That seems to really bring some power if the rest of the page is optimized well.

 

[finnegan]

Ryuzaki, I don't know if you saw the rest of my post or not...

If you don't want to deal with Akismet, you could allow Facebook comments or Disqus. I'd go with Disqus before Facebook, and prefer neither due to their extreme impact on loading times. I want my users to go discuss my posts elsewhere where they can bring in more traffic, and I direct them to do so.

Where is this magical place you send them that brings in more traffic than your site? Are you directing them to your Facebook page to comment on articles there...or somewhere else?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Social Media of all types!

 

[finnegan]

Social Media of all types!

So you send people from the article on your site which has all the ads, back to social media sites just to get more traffic. I never thought that sending users back to Facebook would result in obtaining more new fans, but I'm no social media genius so I'll defer to you on this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

It's not about getting them to view ads. That's not my main monetization method. If they haven't taken the action I'm pushing them towards by the end of the article, I care less if they view a 2nd article.

I'm either sending them to buy a product, they click an ad, or they share the post on social media. Either way, I'm not getting extra views out of anyone who converts in a way I want them to.

The worse my bounce rate, the better. It means they are taking action. I can let someone leave to whatever random site they go to or I can tell them to share the article on their way out. This gets me social signals and more traffic from social media and search engines versus neither.

Having comments on site has never brought me more traffic. Nobody off-site or even off-article knows that conversation is happening. It's just given me a user-generated content headache to deal with.