Did you know there are good and bad choices for permalinks? Yep, there is a best choice and it’s best to make the optimum decision right from the start. The reason is that once you create a permalinks structure and start accumulating links, no matter how bad your initial decision, you don’t want to change the permalink structure! (If you do change it, any old links on other people’s web pages will suddenly be dead. That’s not what you want!)
Ok, so you’ve just started blogging, and no one has linked you yet. Now, I bet you want to know the best permalink structure so you can pick it now! The best two best permalink structures are:
- http://www.domainname.com/name_of_post.html, if you installed your blogging software at the top of your domain or
- http://www.domainname/directory/name_of_post.html, if you installed your blog in a subdirectory.
Notice I picked one of these; my permalink structure is: http://www.bigbucksblogger.com/blog/name_of_post.html. My domainname is ‘bigbucksblogger.com’ and I installed wordpress in a directory called “blog”. When you visit my individual posts, you’ll see theythe ‘name_of_post.html’ varies. It will sort of match the title of the post.
How did I get my permalinks to look like this? Well, once WordPress was installed, I visited the “admin panel” , and found the word “options” on the right hand side of the top panel. I clicked that; a row of links appeared below. Then I found the word “permalinks” and clicked that.
A panel of “common options” appeared. First, I clicked “Date and Name based” because it’s close to optimum.
The “Custom structure” box filled with this: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
I edited the text in that box, leaving only: /%postname%/.
Ok, so why didn’t I pick one of the “Common options”? It would seem those must be good choices if they are common. Well, they aren’t the best options!
Here is why:
- Both readers and, more importantly, search engine guess what the topic of the post based on the url. Including the %postname% in the permalink helps search engines (including Google) guess the topic of the post. In the long run, that’s good for traffic. So, keep %postname% in the permalink. (So, in blog lingo, this is good for “SEO” or search engine optimization.)
- It’s shorter urls are better than longer ones because longer urls tend to break when people email the link. If you take the date out of the permalink structure, you’ll have a slightly shorter url. So, unless you have a reason you want the date in the URL, take it out!
- One of the defaults includes the word “archives”. It’s just an extra word: take it out. Two of the defaults include the post number. The post number is at least short, but readers don’t care if this is your 419th post.
Are there other options you could pick? Sure. If you want to surf the web, you can figure out how to put the blog author’s name in the URL. But that’s modestly useful for a multi-author blog, but really, it’s not very useful. So, if you are a beginner, just use the postname.
After that, start blogging and never change the permalinks again. Oh, and if your blog is more than 6 months old and others are already linking articles: don’t change your permalinks no matter how bad your initial choice was. You’ll lose your links and search engines won’t know where the new articles are. Well designed permalinks are good: back links are better.