Best permalink structure to use for Google, Yahoo and MSN

in WordPress

[Roel]

I thought I'd start a discussion about what would be the best permalink structure to use for WordPress.

Personally I have found:

1. For a site that has categories:
Custom: /%category%/%postname%/

2. For a site that does not have categories (or that has only one):
Custom: /%postname%/

The only issue I can see with this is that long titles contain a lot of dashes (-) in between the words, and according to some prominent seo pages on the net that may look spammy (when more than 5-10 dashes are used), but isn't everyone doing this? And aren't most titles comprised of more than 5-10 words?

What are your thoughts?

[tedster]

Yes, it does seem like lots of people are using the complete title with hyphens as word separators. This includes Matt Cutts, the top webspam engineer for Google. Other are truncating the file name after just a few hyphenated words.

About the spamminess factor: it seems that many who comment about this online are confused between the domain name versus the full url. IMO, many dashes in the domain name is a potential spam signal, but not in the rest of the url.

[Robert Charlton]

Yes, it does seem like lots of people are using the complete title with hyphens as word separators....

I've encountered one custom CMS that used the complete title as a page filename, and I ran into a strange problem with their files. Some of the titles were so long that you couldn't view source on them, because the filenames were too long to open in a Windows text editor. I'm not sure they ever addressed the situation.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:29 pm (utc) on July 31, 2007]