a) Your site gains high traffic, and;
b) Has hundreds of posts

Everyone has the ambition to create popular websites so your advice is not scaleable.

There seems to be an ironic conflict here e.g. on the one hand you're advocating a structure of %category%/%postname% which will help SEO and help yield high traffic; yet that high traffic (combined with hundreds of posts) could lead to chronic performance issues because the URL structure requires many queries, many more than is necessary (or recommended)

I've just created my blog and am learning wordpress stuff now. Very interesting reading, thanks.

On the wordpress website they say "For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields." which basically makes sense as database requests can be slower. Another contra - you can experience issues accessing wp-admin when set up permalinks as %postname%.

Do you experience any of those issues?

To avoid this I have set up permalinks as /%post_id%/%postname%/. I would assume this is the highest performance option and do not let the post name be too far from the web-site address.

I didn't know about google news + page_id - thanks for that. "Three digit issue" is easily resolved by setting last post id to 100 in wp_posts table. That's what I did after reading your guidelines. There can be only one issue: you may lose your revisions, post_parent also needs to be changed.

To compy with google news I will have to use /%post_id%/%postname%-%post_id/ which is a bit weird but who cares about links?

Thanks for advance.

Thanks for the nice post.

I have installed a wordpress blog on IIS. When using permalinks, an index.php appears in the URL. Now my URL becomes:
http://www.mydomain.com/blog/index.php/my-post-title/

Is this index.php harmful from seo point of view? what is the maximum limit of slashes in a URL for better SEO?

Is there any easy solutions to my problem.

Sorry for so many questions. Thanks for your precious time.

Thanks,

Manpreet.

"Starting Permalinks with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons."

There are similar warnings for %postname% and a couple of others. Yet your recommendation (and some of their own examples) includes starting this way. Can you comment on the performance problem and whether the size of the blog or the number of categories is a factor?

I want to set up the permlinks so that the URL shows the postname only on each page e.g as http:///%postname%/

But, despite what you say, this doesn't work.

I don't want to show the year, month ,day or category; just the url and postname.

Does anybody know how I can set things up like this?

Thank you very much.