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Top 10 Blog URL Considerations

November 12, 2007

It's a common for people to have dilemma during a decision making time. I'm no exception. My blog is up for a week now and I had spent a long time on deciding a few things.

I am asking myself "what is the best URL structure?" I want to achieve this URL structure for my "Binh dot Name" and all the following websites I create. The matter is that, I already spent a month or so thinking about this without getting the final decision. Along with the CMS choice, this URL thing delayed me from publishing my blog for too long until I finally fed up of waiting and decide to "Just do it".

What is a Good URL?

My own justification is that a Good URL have the following characteristics:

  • Independent of other factors because Cool URIs don't change (SEO and human reason);
  • It should be descriptive (we like it, so does SE);
  • It should be easy to type (we like it);
  • It should be memorable (we definitely like it).

Why we need good URL?

  • In SEO point of view, a changed URL is not Google's friendly.
  • In SEO point of view, keyword rich URL is good.
  • In SEO point of view, short but descriptive URI give more value to selected keywords.
  • In SEO point of view, memorable URI doesn't count, but for retaining users, short and memorable URL is best.

Top 10 URL considerations:

  1. For website domain, should it be:
    1. http://binh.name, or
    2. http://binh.name ?
  1. For the main blog, should it be:
    1. The main domain, or
    2. Sub domain http://blog.binh.name, or
    3. Sub directory http://binh.name/blog ?
  1. For category:
    1. http://category.binh.name or
    2. http://binh.name/category ?
  1. The URI should be:
    1. Ugly URI with (? And a query, ex: /?p=123), or
    2. Beautified URI /something/something-smaller?
  1. The beautified URL should have:
    1. With trailing slash (/), or
    2. Without trailing slash ?
  1. Beautified URI options for post:
    1. /%post%, or
    2. /%category%/%post%, or
    3. /archives/%post%, or
    4. /blog/%post%, or
    5. /yyyy/mm/dd/%post% ?
  1. With %post%, should it be:
    1. Post name, or
    2. Post id ?
  1. Beautified URL for category:
    1. /category/%category%, or
    2. /cat/%category%, or
    3. /type/%category%, or
    4. /group/%category%, or
    5. /%category% ?
  1. With %category%, should it be:
    1. Category name, or
    2. Category id ?
  1. The prefix first level options:
    1. Singular (ex: category), or
    2. plural (ex: categories)
  1. Beautified URL for tag:
    1. /tag/%tag%, or
    2. /tags/%tag%

What's Next?

If you are an expert in blogging, or an expert web designer, or just someone who happen to know the best URL structure, then please have your say here. Currently I haven't put up the follow plugin, so as a reward the best commentator I will put your links inside my post without the rel="nofollow". Thank you in advance for participating.

Oh, as a matter of quality, please give a reason why you think your choice is good too. Thanks.

Tags: Blogging, SEO, url, Web design

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Written by Binh Nguyen · Filed Under SEO 

Comments

7 Responses to “Top 10 Blog URL Considerations”

  1. ryan on November 12th, 2007 2:02 pm

    I am working on an article at Krispy Blogs right now and have found that /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/ is the best format for #6. :)

  2. simon on November 16th, 2007 1:01 am

    For item 1, drop the "www" it doesn't seem very popular nowadays

    for item 2 , it should be "a" unless your blog is it the main focus of your website

  3. Binh dot Name Major Issues | Binh dot Name on November 16th, 2007 5:55 am

    [...] you can see, my URL is still in ugly form. Earlier I wrote about the good URL structure choices, but since then haven’t got good replies yet. I may need to visit some forum and invite [...]

  4. Binh on November 16th, 2007 2:46 pm

    Excuse me for the late response to comments. I am new to blogging so still was hesitate to write comment on my own post.

    1. Thanks ryan. I visited your blog and really you did use "/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/" I considered that and filtered out from my list earlier. The reason is that year/month/date already is a burden to the URL, putting them at the end have worse effect.

    1.1 each slash "/" mean a folder. So you actually put your page 4 level deep in the site folder structure, and still have the postname as the firs parent folder. This doesn't help in SEO and navigation.

    1.2 when you want to archive (backup) your site into html, you will have trouble because, let say you have 1000 posts, you will have 1000 folders, and then under each folder you have year, under that you have folder month, under that you have folder day. Total add up 1000x4 = 4000, under which have total of 4000 index.html file.

    1.2.1 that lead to the /year/month/day/postname still the better option, because it will group posts in the same day, full feeling of time relevancy.

    1.2.2 that lead to the /year/month/postname better option, because even less folder involved while keeping a fair feeling of time relevancy.

    1.2.3 that lead to the /year/postname also an option, shorter, but less feeling of time relevancy.

    1.3 however, reading the management of folders, the posts at root /postname without any trailing, also cause trouble when it's too many folders.

    Conclusion for 1: If you like the trailing date, you could use the hyphen "-" instead of slash "/" (ie: /postname-year-month-day) so that no extra folder is created.

    2. Thanks Simon for very quick focused comments.

    2.1 For question 1, yes indeed I found WordPress.com stripped of "www". I also researched a lot and found many big names are stripping off the www and joing the non-www.org.

    2.1.1 The matter why I still keep the "www" is for, in case I use more subdomain, to keep track of my own main site using the "site:binh.name" Google search query, and adding binh.name as an URL channel for my AdSense.

    2.1.2 So, i still have the dilema between
    - shorter name (in this case I have only 4 letter domain name + 4 letter TLD add the dot equals 9 letter total), or
    - enable URL tracking for main domain using "www".

    2.2 For question 2, I guess I know what you mean, if I focus on blogging then use option "a".

    2.2.1 Actually I don't know this either. I can write a lot of quality articles that shouldn't be counted toward time, at least should be valid for years to come. For those articles I really considered putting them in as pages.

    2.2.2 I also consider writing short blog entries. So I may actually put some subdomain just called "blog" or something similar. I mean really short 1 or 2 paragraphs just to tell what I am doing/planning without spending hours formatting and categorizing.

  5. Should I Migrate to WordPress MU? on November 29th, 2007 3:37 pm

    [...] days have passed since I started thinking about URL structuring, website structuring, and multi-blogging. I’ve been holding back much because I don’t [...]

  6. James on December 14th, 2008 6:42 pm

    Thanks for a great article ! URL channels have definately assisted in tracking my Google income.

  7. Aaron Rivera on February 7th, 2009 6:57 am

    I agree here one issue though - what about the category base?/ does this matter in the linking of pages??/ as I used that in my internet-based weblog I sued this string here /%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and in the category base I used %category%

    I noticed that some links got broken the older post I mean......

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