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Some things:

1. Notice nowhere in the article does the author mention SEO. The OP here was asking for which was best from an SEO standpoint. So not sure what that article has to do with my suggestions.

2. From the author within comments: "Again, using a simple URL structure like /%postname%/ is not going to cause problems for 99% of the sites out there. It might detract from site performance, if your site has a huge number of pages, and if your site handles a large number of hits per second." Granted there's a point to the fact that it checks against pages AND posts if category or postname is used first, so going with just /post-name may slow load times when there's a lot of posts.

3. More comments from people on that post:

"You guys are making this too complicated.. MySQL, PHP, and computers LOVE numbers.. just put a unique number (like an article ID) in the first parameter of the URL.. example: /10022/I_love_this_article_from_my_blog/.. MySQL will find this FAST (searching for 10022) and the person reading the blog will like the pretty permalink.. as far as categories go, if you want people to find categories in your URL then list the category AFTER the number and before the pretty post name.. but again, why make it difficult? You are looking for database efficiency and speed here, right?" (this was one of my suggestions and does take care of the issue the author was mentioning)

"Dates in the URL might look appropriate for a true Blog, but %category%/%postname% is far more user friendly, and many visitors will instinctively know to trim the URL to see the category home page." (what I use on my own site - as mentioned it's very visitor friendly and as I mentioned, it would not be advisable if more than one category would be used per post...in the case of my blog, a lot of people look up posts by category so IMO the structure I use is very intuitive for visitors not to mention SEO friendly...any slightly longer load time I'll happily take to get more traffic and please that traffic)

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