How do you manage Wordpress URL hierarchy with permalinks?

[MarloSchneider]

I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue.

With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/  because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages.  On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error).

I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play.

What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue?

Thanks

[RyanKent]

I am in the process of setting up my first wordpress site now. I have given a lot of thought to the URL structure. I decided upon the following structure:

/%post_id%.%postname%/

My reasoning is as follows:

• including the post id offers the advantage of proper scaling as the site grows. As you mentioned, there are issues when not using a unique numeric identifier, especially when performing searches. These issues will impact your entire site with slow performance.

• another advantage of this structure is the flexibility to change post titles without breaking links. Consider the case where you create an article called "Google social service goes live" then later determine your article will do better in search engines with a title of "Google Facebook service goes live". If you change the title with your current structure you will break links and have to 301 the pages. If you include the post id in the URL, you can pull articles solely off the post id and all old links would work without the use of 301s.

• I was debating whether to use categories or not. Categories do provide clear structures, but categories can change over time and many articles could be included in multiple categories. What led me to my final decision of not including categories is wikipedia's model. Wikipedia's flat structure works on a very large scale without categories.

You are welcome to consider any or all of the above reasoning. I hope it helps your decision-making process.

[Sebes]

I would use the following
/%year%-%monthnum%-%day%-%postname%-%post_id/
/2010-08-04-titleofthepost-276762

Reasons:
Date for visitors, usually visitors need a clue whether your content is recent or not.
Postname for obvious reason
and ID for internal tracking and analysis

Furthermore using this structure makes it easy to analyse a site later in excel by text to column functions etc.

Plugins: I reccomend All in one SEO pack

[Sebes]

• another advantage of this structure is the flexibility to change post titles without breaking links.

Well, I think that changing your title would break links and leads to another indexation. /12345.oldtitle/ is a different URL then /12345.newtitle/ or isn't it?

[RyanKent]

That certainly works from a functional perspective.

Based on the original question and the avoidance of any numbers in the current URL, it seems that would be quite undesirable.

Many people want to avoid all numbers in URLs as it looks quite ugly. Including the post id allows a balance between minimizing numerical use, and functionality.