Picture this. You’re at a casual dinner party and you have a friendly discussion on healthy activities. The next day, your friend sends you a link to your work email address that says “Read this!”. You click it and it brings you to an article that discusses an activity that the two of you didn’t think of the other night. No problem, right?
Well, the title of the article is “Good Sex Is Good For You!” and the article link is http://www.selfhelpmagazine.com/articles/good-sex.php. Uhm, you’re at work! The title isn’t a problem but why couldn’t the link just end in with an article number like 18220.html?
That link is called a permalink. It’s the URL of an article, blog post, or any other page that’s not the home page. How does this affect bloggers? Two critical ways…
- Permalinks should have keywords. It may not have mattered much back in the static era of 1994 but today, your posts should have keywords since they could potentially increase traffic. The right permalink format could tell web crawlers a lot about the page and most search engine algorithms grant higher rank positions for good permalinks. This very basic SEO tactic is one that every blogger should implement. Permalinks with keywords = search engine smiles.
- Permalinks are called permalinks for a reason…they’re permanent! That means if you change a link for your post from http://freebloghelp.com/524 to http://freebloghelp.com/whos-afraid-of-outbound-links, the former still exists in search engines’ eyes even though the content had been moved to another resting place. Dead links = search engine frowns.
So what can a blogger do? Let’s start with getting it right the first time. If you’re using WordPress.org, you’re in luck. Your default post will have a permalink that looks like http://freebloghelp.com/524 so you’ll want to change the default permalink structure. Here’s one way to do it:
- Login to your WordPress dashboard
- Click on Settings on the left nav
- Click on Permalinks on the left sub nav
- Click the Custom Structure radio button under Common Settings
- Type /%postname%/
Changing permalink default structure in WordPress is easy
Now you know why that article had “good sex” in the permalink!
If you’ve already started letting your blog platform name your posts, it’s still not too late to retrofit them. Check out these WordPress permalink plugins.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration – With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.
Search Permalink – The Search Permalink plugin redirects HTTP GET requests in the form of http://example.com/blog/?s=foo to http://example.com/blog/search/foo/ may it be from <form> submissions, manually entered URIs, or even old links pointing to search results. It uses WordPress 2.2’s built-in internal permalink interpreter.
Advanced Permalinks – Provides advanced permalink options that allow you to have multiple permalink structures and 301 redirect old permalink structures (many structures are allowed). No longer supported but still works!
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I use Godley’s redirection plugin, wrote a couple of posts about permalinks as well.
And yes, you can change the article title, the text of the title element, but if you change the permalink, you better have something establishing a 301 redirect from the old to the new.
Here’s a challenge for you (and readers): how long does a 301 need to be maintained before search engines drop the old link in favor of the new one?
And another: suppose you finally drop your 301… what traffic will you miss?
Great questions, Dave. I know in the past, I’ve had seen minor changes to permalinks that took over a year for Google to update. But that was almost five years ago. I wonder if others had the same experience or if things have changed so that search engines pick up the change quicker.
I had no idea you could determin what went into the link…other than the title. I am considering starting a blog and will keep it in mind.
Elizabeth
Dave always coming up with great technical questions.
Do you know the answer Dave? I’ve curious now? Fortunately, I started writing all my post with permalinks from day 1. Hopefully that keeps me from having those problems.
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Very useful point Gabe, 2 more cents from my end, try to avoid words like to, as , and from permalink, which does not make sense for search engines.. Keep it short, sweet and meaningful.
So true. I’m guilty as charged with not editing the junk words out of my permalinks!
I never knew the intricacies of permalinks, Gabe this article is very helpful. Its also great to know that leaving out the unnecessary words can help too! Great post- thanks for sharing, I’ll pass it along!
As being so very new to the world of blogs, ezines and related technology, I really appreciate all of the information! And hopefully I will have the time to carefully read everything and learn from it. Cheers!
Thinking of remove the date on my blog permalinks. Can Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin work?
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Never tried it but even if you don’t want to retrofit your old posts, you can still do it the way you want moving forward.
This is extremely beneficial information for any blogger to know. It’s also quite simple to understand. Having permalinks helps in so many ways and just like anything else it takes time.
You know, I’ve read a number of the articles you have wrote and I really enjoy what all you’ve had to talk about. Great blog for one and keep up the good work. Any advice you have for me I’m open ears.
Thanks for the feedback!
Since you’re in absorb mode, just do what you’re doing now … learn as much as possible.
Then get your blog over the wordpress.org and choose a theme. Give it time since it won’t happen over night but if you continue to learn every day, you’ll move right on past all the bloggers who are currently standing still.