The WordPress Evangelist

A few days ago I changed the permalink structure on my Davao Delicious blog from /%category%/%postname%/ to /%year%/%category%/%postname%/. As of this writing, that blog has a PageRank of 4 and a lot of the posts and pages are indexed by Google. Some might say my move was risky because it would cause my blog to lose some Google love juice… But, there’s a documented case against having the %category% slug as the first part of your blog URL (after the domain name, that is).

DavaoDeli.com

You see, I wanted my food blog to have a logical URL system, wherein my readers would know right away what type of food establishment they were reading about just by looking at the URL. For example, when I’d write about a coffee establishment, the resulting URL would be http://www.davaodeli.com/coffee-shop/name-of-the-cafe/. But, the WordPress experts have said that using the category name as the first part of the permalink is a bad idea.

WordPress stores URL rewrite rules in the site’s database (is this a good idea?) — the instructions to form the pretty URLs your blog gets for your posts, pages and attachments (i.e., the dedicated page displaying an image attached to a post). In a nutshell, the problem is a performance issue: when %category% is used at the start of the permalink structure, the database table containing the above-mentioned rewrite rules get overloaded with hundreds of lines of instructions. The cause is the way WordPress interprets each post’s, page’s and attachment’s URL. Here’s something from the WP Codex:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID. See wp-testers discussion of this topic.

So, in order to optimize my blog’s performance, what I did was to change DavaoDeli.com’s permalink structure to include %year% at the beginning, but still retaining the category name. For example:

http://www.davaodeli.com/2010/general/attention-davao-caterers/

When updating permalinks, WordPress automatically redirects old URLs to the new ones. If, for example, another site has a link to one of my blog posts using the old URL, click-throughs will correctly resolve to the new URL. The question is, how will Google treat my blog now?

Hopefully, having a well-maintained sitemap (c/o the Google XML Sitemap plugin) will ensure that my blog’s posts and pages will remain in Google’s index. I wonder, though, if I need to declare 301 redirects for all my blog’s posts and pages in the .htaccess file…?