smart computer use?

I like to argue that you should not use category names in your permalinks. I argue this because the fact that I did use category names in the permalinks kinda backfired on me quick. I hope to maybe save you a little bit of trouble.

Soon after setting up my first WordPress web site, I found myself in a mess with my categories. I had been making new categories, it seemed, for every two or three posts. Only a couple categories escaped this rut and had more than two or three entries.

A quick digression, I also found out that a couple pages were nicely ranked by Google and sucking in some traffic.

Now, here’s the thing. I started realizing I was going to need to re-work my category structure to simplify site navigation. I also then realized that I’d be breaking the permalinks that Google had indexed by moving those articles to different categories, because I had included the name of the category in the permalinks.

So, then, after going into the options of the WordPress site and removing the category name from the permalink structure, I had effectively broken the links from Google.

I actually didn’t care too much about having to do this, I just want to make sure I never have to do that again to another site. I can chalk this first mistake up to experience.

Google will re-crawl my site and re-index links eventually.

Please do learn from this small mistake. I’m glad I caught it early in the life of the website.