I’m reviewing this blog structure and setting to see if it is set up properly and SEO optimized. 2 areas that I’m looking at : what is the best structure for permalink and if it is good to place the contents in multiple categories. It began when I was reading SEOBook’s blogger’s guide to SEO. 1 thing that caught my attention was this 1 video on why you should place your contents into a single category. Please view the video created by graywolf and you’ll understand why. Basically it is about duplicate contents in the eye of search engine. I’ve been occasionally placing my contents on more than 1 categories, so moving forward I should (and you too) avoid it.

Another areas that I’ve been considering is how permalink should be structured. Permalink is one of the earliest setting that you must consider when you initially set up your blog. The default setup which is http://www.blogjer.com/?p=123 looks meaningless to most users.

Some blogs put in dates (it could be in whatever format and whether full date or not) + post title whereas some only put the post title. So which one is better in terms of SEO? Frankly speaking, I’m not sure which one. Initially, when I started blogging, I was using the one with only post title. But after some time, I changed them to have date + post title since I have a regular weekly post called what-interesting which covers on the interesting stuffs that I could find for that particular week, only which I have it discontinued. I plan to have the post title ‘What is interesting this week’ instead of ‘What is interesting this week Dec 27 2007′. The latter looks quite long and not so attractive. So, the idea is, since I have the date on my permalink, I can remove the date from my post title without the content being considered as a duplicate content by search engines due to the similar title posted each week.

I’m also doing spot checks on a couple of blogs in my RSS reader to see what their common practice is. The blogs are those of famous SEO blogs, official search engine blogs, famous earn income online blogs, tech blog and etc. This is done randomly and link love is only given to the blogs with their name different than their URL.

Permalink with name based only without date

SEOMoz.com
SEOBook.com
Greywolf -
Digital Inspiration – Title + post #
JohnChow.com
Matt Cutt of Google

Permalink with name based + date
lorelle at wordpress
techcrunch.com
searchengineland.com – Date + number
Shoemoney.com
Problogger.net – Archive + date
LiewCF.com – Archive folder + date
Google Official Blog – Archive folder + Date
Ask.com Official Blog – Archive folder + Date
Microsoft live search blog – Archive folder + Date

Permalink with Numeric only

Yahoo and Jeremy seems like did not care about their permalink. It is using only numeric.

Yahoo Search Blog -
Jeremy – Yahoo Search Engineer

So, what do you think? Which one is more SOE friendly??