ljkerleyWhen I set up my blog, I wanted to have permalinks so people could link with my posts. I also knew it was important from an SEO perspective to have text-based URLs for my posts (Google says so). So when I configured the permalinks, and I set them up as 'custom' with the format of /%category%/%postname%/
This worked fine. However, this approach appears to have had an impact that I didn't expect. It looks like that when I assign my posts to numerous categories, that WP saves a copy of my post in each category. Is that right? Is that what it did?
I have this impression because when I check my website indexing on Google, I see the same post come up with different category links. One says .../blog/websites/adding-video-to-websites.shtml Another says '.../blog/category/video/' (no filename at the end). Another says '.../blog/2010/07' (again no filename at the end)
If I interpreted that correctly, I have numerous URLs for the same post. I am of course worried about the impact to SEO and how Google may consider this to be duplicate content.
I checked into several SEO plug-ins, but the plug-ins don't seem to change the post URLs, just the meta tags.
So then I thought, OK just change the permalink format so that at least going forward I do not create all of these duplicate URLs. So I changed it (perhaps too quickly) so that the custom format is just /%postname%/
I then realized Google had indexed the files under the different category URLs, and if you click on the URLs from SERPs, the links now trigger a 404... So I changed it back.
I do think it would be better moving forward to drop the categories from the files. So if I do decide to change my permalink format, am I correct in thinking I will have to do 301 redirects for each of my existing posts, for each category they were assigned to?
Is there any easier way for me to get out of this mess?
And now I checked the docs and they discourage using %postname% or %category% in the first position of a permalink for performance reasons. This is frustrating because putting the other candidates (date info) will make the URL less SEO-friendly (Google recommends
for text-based filenames not filenames with numbers) ...
I am also thinking I assumed categories worked in a different way than I thought they did. The docs says only "When you assign multiple categories to a post, only one can show up in the permalink. This will be the lowest numbered category" -- no idea what 'lowest numbered category' means. But when wouldn't you assign a post to multiple categories?... Isn't that the whole point, allow people to find a post according to different criteria? Is assigning posts to multiple categories has such negative consequences, why do they allow it? Or not warn people?
