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SEO and best practices for WordPress Permalinks

February 10, 2009
Category: SEO, WordPress | 20 Comments

Permalinks are the permanent links to content on your wordpress blog. Other bloggers or websites will use the permalinks to point to your post. Permalinks are also very usefull if you want to be able to share your posts because the URL to each post remains permanent.

WordPress comes with a set of default permalinks and also allows you to create your own structure of permalinks. This gives rise to the question:

The default structure

To start with, the default permalink structure that comes with wordpress is not very good in terms of SEO.  No wonder wordpress calls it the “Ugly” permalink. It looks like:

http://yoursite.com/?p=post_id

Although this looks simple but it can get really confusing with long URLs  and this is difficult to remember.  From SEO point of view this URL is not good because it does not tell anything about the page content.

The PATHINFO

 Another slightly better way of creating permalinks is by using the actual path. PATHINFO permalinks looks like:

http://yoursite.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Note the “index.php” in the URL, typical of PATHINFO permalinks. Although PATHINFO permalinks are better than the default structure but still they are not very SEO friendly. Most bloggers prefer to use a structure called the pretty permalinks discussed below.

Pretty permalinks

In pretty permalinks you can create your own permalink using structure tags. Most common form are:

http://yoursite.com/category/post-name/
http://yoursite.com/year/month/day/post-name

This gives lot of flexibility but also creates concerns about SEO. So keeping SEO in mind what is the best way to create a permalink?

SEO and Permalinks

Comments

20 Responses to “SEO and best practices for WordPress Permalinks”

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