WordPress: Using Permalinks
I am starting this new category where I would like to share some things that I have learned while working with WordPress. If you have any good experience or tips for WordPress users please feel free to post here.
I will begin form topic that have got me started with WordPress. When you have a website that generates dynamic URLS, you know how much talk was out there about “permalinks” search engines friendliness. Although before I started to use permalinks in my WordPress web sites, I found that my links where indexed quiet well by Yahoo! and MSN. It always took much longer to index my pages in Google, but I am not sure if it had to do with permalinks.
Most search engines these days have no problem to index pages with dynamic URLS today. But question marks and other characters in URLS can be confusing for crawlers. See how the question about indexing dynamically generated pages is answered in Google’s Webmasters Help Center:
Does Google index dynamic pages?
Yes, Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored. If you’re concerned that your dynamically generated pages are being ignored, you may want to consider creating static copies of these pages for our crawler.
If you have a small WorPress Site you can do as Google suggest and make copies of static pages. But if you are updating your website frequently it makes sense to use permalinks rather than follow Google’s advise on creating static copies of each page you generte with WorPress.
No matter what your SEO needs are, I would customize my permalinks just for purpose of aesthetics. Using other than default settings for your permalinks would eliminate question marks and other crawler-confusing characters from your URLS. In the example below you can see how permalinks are set for this site:
Although the above example works well for me, it may not be the case with oyur website. You have to decide on how do you want your permalinks to be structured.
If you have installed your WorPress via Fantastico scripts from your web hosting provider, this is all you have to do.
Otherwise you would need to have access to .htaccess. If you do I would recommend to read more at WordPress on permalinks.
Enjoy and if you have a tip to share please do so.
