[wp-hackers] is it a good idea to remove the category base?

[Daniel Fenn]

I recall reading a post on Otto site about having the post id missing
from the perm url. I dont know if that the same thing though. Sent
from phone

On 03/12/2011, IC IC <icwordpress at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry for not making my question clear, though I do appreciate all
> answers as far as the SEO aspect is concerned.
>
> I was more on the performance side.
>
> After reading Otto's article (
> http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/,
> ), I thought removing the categories will have some impact. Please
> answer this question for a site that has about 200 cats and 100 pages
> or so.
>
> When the cat base is missing, how would WP will interpret the order?
> Is that a page? or a cat? Isn't more work to do? Or was it going to
> check all the cats anyway so it would not matter anyway...
>
> IN the ASP world, request.queryString, request.cookies, request.post
> etc.... are the recommended way of getting the user input. but asp
> allows me to go request("firstname"). by default, it would first look
> into the query string, so it is safe and there is no performance trade
> offf, if I was interested getting the first name from a qs. but if the
> firstname was being submitted via form post, then asp would have
> wasted some cycles going thru request.querystring collection before it
> seeks the variable in the form collection.
>
> Since I'm new to WP, is there a similat issue here? if cats are
> omitted from the base, would it ever matter at all as far as permalink
> resolutions?
>
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 6:17 PM, David Law
> <wp-hackers at google-adsense-templates.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2 Dec 2011 15:27:09 -0800, you wrote:
>>
>>>The codex has this to say about Category base and Tag base
>>>
>>><quote>
>>>The Category base and Tag base are prefixes used in URLs for category
>>>and tag archives, which look like this:
>>>
>>> example.net/wp/category_base/category_name
>>> example.net/wp/tag_base/tag_name
>>>
>>>The default values for these are category and tag. You can change
>>>them, but you can't remove them from the URLs altogether.
>>></quote>
>>>
>>>But we all know that there are plugins that let you overcome this
>>>limitation allowing you to remove the category base, the question is
>>>SHOULD WE?
>>
>> Everything below is talking pure SEO, there are other factors to
>> consider.
>>
>> From an SEO perspective all words within a URL have an SEO impact, but
>> not a massive amount, one non-SEO'd word isn't something to loose
>> sleep over.
>>
>> Ideally a URL would be the main SERP a page is targeting and maybe a
>> few related keywords.
>>
>> Having a base category and tag word can be a negative, but also a
>> positive depending on the site.
>>
>> For a highly niche site where most posts are about one subject it
>> makes sense to change the category and tag base to a relevant keyword
>> or two. For example the site in my sig the category base is changed to
>> /seo/ since pretty much every page on the site is related to SEO.
>>
>> If it's a site with diverse content you can use a hyphen (-) if you
>> don't want to use a plugin. Google considers a hyphen as a seperator
>> (a space) so is basically SEO neutral in this context.
>>
>> For SEO reasons I tend to only use categories and not tags, they are
>> pretty much the same output wise so not much point using both. So have
>> never had a site where I have to worry about changing both the
>> category and tag base, on the rare site I use tags (never many of
>> them) I leave the tag base as tag. If you had to get rid of both you
>> could use an underscore (_) for the tag base.
>>
>> Don't make these changes on indexed sites, you'll damage your SERPs.
>>
>> Included this info in one of my WordPress SEO Tutorials
>> http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress/seo-friendly-wordpress-permalinks
>>
>> I've considered using a plugin to remove them, but that means your
>> category/tag URLs could clash with your static Page URLs or even Post
>> URLs if you use /%postname% for your permalinks setting. So on my
>> WordPress sites (got about 90) I've used a relevant keyword or hyphen
>> instead, also means there's no chance of performance issues removing
>> them.
>>
>> Works for me, my sites recieve tens of thousands of search engine
>> visitors a day :-)
>>
>> David
>> --
>> http://www.stallion-theme.com/ Stallion WordPress SEO Theme
>> http://www.stallion-theme.com/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin Stallion
>> WordPress SEO Plugin
>>
>>
>>>For some reason, I sense that this kind of a modification would effect
>>>the performance and may cause odd behavior.
>>>Any comment-|insight appreciated ?
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-- 
Regards,
Daniel Fenn