How is best to use Permalinks for Wordpress /category/postname or /postname

[anitawapa]

Hello ,

I have a question Regarding the Permalink structure form Wordpress ,I am trying to figure out what would be the best structure of the blog post link ,for the moment I am using the structure  example.com/postname and I changed the structure to example.com/category/postname ,redirected with 301 the old links to the new links and I thought about it and wanted to ask ,

I would really appreciate if you could tell me what is best form SEO point of view to do.

Regards,

[Lumina]

I would say that example.com/category/postname is the better way to go. It's good for SEO and, as an example. many popular (and even marketing-specific blogs like Hubspot) use categories before a post name in their URLs.

The only real downside is that the URLs themselves will be longer. Though, unless you expect posts to end up on SERPs. that shouldn't matter too much. Another thing to consider is: if some of your posts would fall under multiple categories, then you'll have to choose between them each time. Again, not a huge issue, but one to consider.

[Justian]

I have to Agree with Lumina and I would like to add:

When you are using a url string like this:

example.com/category/postname

It makes it easier to track what categories that are doing best on your site in analytics or other tracking software you might be using. As well as it tells the user what topic the post is all about.

In My opinion the example.com/category/postname is the best practice and it also helps defining how you site is structured.

[anitawapa]

Thank you for your answer ,but for example i have posts looking like this example.com/postname  and they have some weight  connected to the home page,after i reconfigure the permalink into example.com/category/postname ,would i lose all the weight from the post ?and will transfer the weight of the post to the category ? right now the juice will go directly to the website example.com ,but after i introduce the category for every post the juice will go to the category and my website will get lower in juice,weight, like right now i have on homepage DA 25 and PA 36,But after this modification do you think will remain the same ? i doubt it

[anitawapa]

Thank you for your answer ,but for example i have posts looking like this example.com/postname  and they have some weight  connected to the home page,after i reconfigure the permalink into example.com/category/postname ,would i lose all the weight from the post ?and will transfer the weight of the post to the category ? right now the juice will go directly to the website example.com ,but after i introduce the category for every post the juice will go to the category and my website will get lower in juice,weight, like right now i have on homepage DA 25 and PA 36,But after this modification do you think will remain the same ? i doubt it

[Justian]

The juice flowing to your posts from your frontpage will still be the same, but if you have post that have external links pointing to them you wanna make sure that you are using 301's to direct the traffic to the new path.

And just because your post urls are example.com/category/postname doesnt send them any less value then you link from you frontpage. The juice till not go to the category it would still go to the post. But the stucture is more clear to people and search engines

[DennisSeymour]

If it's a very tight niche with similar or related categories, Id just go with a post name. It's cleaner and easier to promote.

I go the category route if it's a different set of products/topics or ecommerce site.

Both works

[Lumina]

In the short-term, even using 301 redirects may have a slight negative effect on the weight of your links, but in the long-term, they shouldn't be affected by it really.