So among the sites I have spawned (GenesisDriven.com, AndrewPeng.net, Over-Boost.net) I’ve been reading on how to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make it faster and easiar for Google and other search engines to index my site and make it searchable. According to this page:
Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can’t crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.
And so I set about setting the permalink structure for mod_rewrite to this structure:
/posts/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%%post_id%-%postname%.html
Which is great, because WordPress will automatically redirect any of the standard permalink structures to your custom one, so people linking in will still have their links work. Content like pictures still use the same link structure so thats not anything to worry about. See where I prefixed %post_id% with %day% – this allows early posts with post_id’s with less than three digits to get indexed too.