Category Base in Wordpress

[casper434]

I notice that there is a checkbox on the Yoast SEO Plugin for "strip category base". What is the reason to do this? What are the SEO advantages and disadvantages?

[diywm]

In WordPress, if you have categories of dogs, budgies and cats, the category pages that WordPress generates for you will be

• www.yoursite.com/category/cats
• www.yoursite.com/category/dogs
• www.yoursite.com/category/budgies

So the word category appears in each URL diluting the keywords.  Yoast allows you to remove the "category" part of this altogether, if you want to. I don't think there are any disadvantages to it other than when you look at a page URL you'll have a hard time telling if it is a category page or not.

The advantage is that you page doesn't look generated to the naked eye - the word category in the URL is giveaway.  If you go to the trouble of inserting some relevant unique info at the top of each category page this will look even better, both to humans and search engines.  You also make the URL a little more relevant.

You can instead specify a word to replace category and tag in the URL which is another route. So rather than category you can specify some niche word where appropriate.