Would it be beneficial to change the URL?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Brenda Malone: I would remove the /post/ It does nothing to help either Google or a visitor understand the subject of the post. That said, it really does little harm, either, and if you end up adding other categories, it could help keep them classified into topic areas.IF you change, be sure to do a 301-Regex redirect of the existing posts to the new structure.
  
  
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  Katia Martin: Brenda Malone doesn’t that get done automatically by Wordpress
  
  
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  Brenda Malone: Katia Martin No, the redirections do not occur automatically for existing posts that will experience the change. There are some SEO and other permalink plugins that will help with this if you don`t want to do the manual redirections. Like: Permalink Manager Lite, Redirection, or even https://wordpress.org/plugins/single-category-permalink/
  
  WORDPRESS.ORGSingle Category PermalinkSingle Category Permalink
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: A long time ago someone proposed a theory that says if you change things up on a stale Website (which is hard to define), the search engines might find the different structure "more interesting" (I`m sure that`s NOT the way they put it).
  
  It`s a theory I`ve been forced to test a few times by unusual circumstances. I`ve never been convinced that it`s true.
  
  What I -HAVE- found is that as you change URLs things can become a little confusing - probably more so for people than for search engines. You may see 2 URLs for the same content in the SERPs for a while. That`s okay with the search algorithms as they`re only following redirects.
  
  Another thing that happens is you might see a temporary improvement for content that was downgraded by quality algorithms. This was more true about 10 years ago than today, when the Panda quality algorithm was run against sites in a manual/batch mode. But there are other quality algorithms, too. So if you lost traffic due to the most recent Panda rollout, you could move the content to another domain and it would kind of return for a while - until it was scored again. But the Panda algorithm is now run continuously against content - so that`s not likely to happen in such a broad way again. But as I said, there are still other quality algorithms for which that effect may yet hold true.
  
  If you change more than just the URLs - if you change the crawl pathways (like moving stuff from one category to another, or noindexing category pages, or deleting content, etc.) then you`re stirring the pot.
  
  Sometimes those things help. Sometimes they hurt.
  
  I wouldn`t change URL structures for the sake of getting an SEO boost. The algorithms don`t care. But people tend to favor shorter URLs. They may remember them more easily, or be more likely to click on a URL they can fully read in the search results (versus one that isn`t clear).