Not Using Permalinks - Search Engine Suicide
February 27th, 2007 by CourtI’m a huge fan of mybloglog.com, I love to see what other bloggers are up to. I’m always able to find new, interesting blogs that are fun and interesting. I usually check out at least 25 new blogs a day. It’s shocking to me that so many bloggers don’t have their permalinks set up properly!
If you’re using a WordPress blog, using the default URIs with questions marks and numbers is search engine suicide! You’ll never get as much traffic as you would with your permalinks set up properly.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t get any traffic at all from search engines if you leave your URIs as question marks and numbers; you’ll always get some if you have enough valuable, unique content. What I don’t get is why the people don’t set them up in the beginning. People, it takes less than one minute to set this up!
If you’re new to WordPress, you set this up by going to Options, and then Permalinks. At this point it will give you some options. I would select the one that is date and name based. This option is very search engine friendly, it shows the title of your entry in the URI. This option also allows your users to see when the entry was published.
If you don’t care about showing the publishing date to your users, you can choose the custom option, adding /%postname%/ to the custom field. (By this I mean the empty box directly to the right of where it says custom structure.) This will make it so that your title is used in the URI. After you’ve made your selection, make sure to click the ‘Update Permalink Structure’ button. You’re all set!
Warning To Older Blogs
If you’re already getting search engine traffic on your default URIs, I wouldn’t advise switching them, unless you’re willing to be patient for a while. Making a major change like this will probably hurt your search engine traffic in the short term. I do believe that it will be a positive in the long term, but you’ll have to weigh the decision carefully.
Advice For New Blogs
Switch your permalink structure now! It will take like 20 seconds and will make a big difference for the success of your blog.
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March 10th, 2007 at 4:36 am
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March 23rd, 2007 at 9:57 am
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May 14th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Court - first of all, thanks for the comments you left at my blog.
Second, I totally agree with you about the permalinks. I had originally setup my site without them and was doing a decent amount of traffic, but once I switched over, my traffic nearly doubled once the new pages got crawled and indexed!!!
PS - It’s funny how many blogs I run into that have similar topics to mine… I wonder how many more are out there???
May 17th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
One thing I would add is that on many blogger templates the permalink is very small. For some reason you have to click on the date to get the permalink, many bloggers lose out on links because people can’t find the permalink, it happened on my blog I know.
I definitely thinks its worth making the change you suggest, but I wouldn’t advise changing old URLs.
http://www.netwriting.co.uk/2007/05/14/best-url-structure/
June 28th, 2007 at 2:20 am
is there any parmalink option in blogger.com. please explain. nice post this.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Woah! Good thing you reminded me about this. My main blog is activated with permalinks, but all the others are still at default.
Thanks!
August 30th, 2007 at 7:36 am
I learned this early on and I am so glad i did. Best to start this practice from the very first post.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:54 am
I believe you are losing permalinks wrongly as well. You are losing pagerank each time you move up a folder ex:
courtneytuttle.com/2007/…/…/pagerank.html
September 6th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[…] can use the keyword as the filename of the HTML page. On a blog, make sure your site is set to use keyword permalinks and place the keyword in the post or page […]
September 7th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
I couldn’t agree more. I had this problem a few years ago with my first blog. I never showed up in the search results because of my keywords. Now my SERPs are great even though my blog is new and I have no page rank
November 5th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Court:
As you know I am a very new blog. If I change this now, will it be retroactive and cause every current link to me to be invalid?
Or does teh change take effect going forward?
Your advice on my specific situation would be greatly appreciated!
Jessica
November 6th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Hi Jessica, when you make this change, it removes the old URLs, so yes links to those pages will be invalid unless you do a 301 redirect from each old URL to the new one. If you’re not getting search traffic yet I would just make the change now and not worry about it!
December 5th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
This was very useful man! It seems like there are endless things to learn on building the perfect blog…
Dwayne
January 4th, 2008 at 11:27 am
[…] Not Using Permalinks - Search Engine Suicide […]
January 5th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[…] Your blog is not using permalinks. […]
January 6th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
[…] best section with well written and interesting posts. One being a post on permalinks and bloggers committing search engine suicide; Court provides some valuable advice that I’ve heard from other bloggers – making it easy for […]
January 19th, 2008 at 8:00 am
I did this on my blog, it seems very logical and it does not take a lot of time, thankfully I did it in my blog’s infancy. Luckily I read Courtney Tuttle Dot Com very frequently too!
February 1st, 2008 at 10:19 am
I initially started with the wordpress default settings then changed it after about 4 posts. Now I just have to wait for all the new posts to get indexed. great site…very helpful.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
thanks for this great post. unfortunately, when i changed permalinks (even using permanent migration plugins for WP), all my site’s page ranks were gone. traffic though remained almost the same.
March 19th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I would have to agree with this post.. I would also like to say that setting it up so the categories show in the permalink may seem like a good idea, but can cause a lot of trouble if you change categories down the road… so do it the right way and use the date.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I guess this is one thing that separates the newbies from the pros, at least to start with. Simple things like this are important!
March 25th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Good thing I saw this. My main photography blog is activated with permalinks, but all 4 the others are still set at default.
Cheers!
May 20th, 2008 at 2:12 am
[…] I found this great article. You can read rest of it here : here […]
May 29th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
For crying out loud. It’s “URL” not “URI.” It stands for “Uniform Resource Locator.”
June 19th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
[…] fare tutto questo manualmente. Con un blog di WordPress ciò quasi in modo automatico, a condizione che disponga permalink enadissanguate e utilizzare la parola chiave come il titolo post e […]
June 25th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[…] Yes, that’s a permalink too, but not a very nice one. Compared to the original, it’s shorter, but it gives no indication of where the link is going to take you. For search engines, it gives no indication of what the page has content about — a form of search engine suicide. […]