When ever we talk about SEO of any site, permalink plays major role in overall optimization. A permalink is Permanent link of your page and posts and it doesn’t change with time. By default WordPress offer permalink like this:
http://www.shoutmeloud.com/?p=123
Which is not search engine friendly and most of newbie bloggers who just started with WordPress, they miss out optimizing WordPress permalink for SEO. In this guide, I will be talking about which permalink structure is the best and will also look into other suggested WordPress permalink structure and why you should avoid them.
WordPress permalink and SEO factor:
One of the major On page SEO factor is having your Keyword in your post URL (Permalink). Default WordPress permalink is non SEO friendly and when you Install WordPress for the first time and start blogging without making any change, you are blogging with a non SEO friendly permalink structure. I have already mentioned in my WordPress essential settings guide, that permalink is the first thing you should change while setting up your blog for the first time.
You can find various Permalink settings under WordPress dashboard > Settings > Permalink and few suggested permalink structures are:
- Domain.com/Category/Post-name
- Domain.com/Postname (/%postname%/)
- Domain.com/postname/numeric-ID
Out of all my favorite and suggested permalink structure for WordPress blog is: Post Name . Post name permalink is short, sweet and has nothing extra which will affect your On page SEO score. Many Bloggers recommend using Category in permalink which is also good only when your Category name is short and meaningful and you are not using multiple categories/post. Though, I’m not a big fan of using category in Permalink structure, as depending upon your indexing settings, it may lead to duplicate content on WordPress blog.
Another Permalink which I highly recommend to avoid is: Using dates in your Permalink. This takes away your capability of republishing your post at later age. As Permalink remains the same, but when you republish post, it makes it look bad as you will still be using old date in permalink.
You can read more about it on : Why changing permalink after post publishing is a bad idea.
WordPress Permalink for Google News:
If you are running a news based site for example current affairs, Bollywood news, Technology news kind of site, you need to have 3 digit unique ID in your permalink as mentioned in Google news submission requirement.
/%postname%-%post_id%/
Some time back Matt Cutts, Google Engineer also changed his WordPress blog permalink structure to domain.com/post-name and here is an explanation from him:
Though he didn’t mentioned any thing directly about SEO benefits of using simple WordPress permalink, but he did mentioned about such permalink helps in keeping thing simple.
Read: How to write SEO optimized article in WordPress
Take away and other Permalink SEO Tips:
- Use Simple permalink (domain.com/postname)
- Prefer dashes over underscore (Source)
- Remove stop words from permalink like (Is, are)
- Never change Permalink after publishing & if you do, setup a 301 redirection from old to new URL using .htaccess
- Use your Keyword in Permalink
Couple of months back I changed permalink structure of an existing site and make sure it was 301 redirection, but somehow after changing permalink structure affected my site traffic. So, if you have a huge site, I recommend you to avoid changing permalink until it’s unavoidable. You can refer to this guide, where I mentioned how I changed permalink structure for an existing site.
Another big debate on Permalink is using : www or non www in the URL of your domain. Earlier, I used to prefer www in my permalinks, but since world is going to short and simple version, I prefer using non www in my site name. It gives you more space in permalink and as you know, search engine index only 66 characters from your Permalink. If you choose non www version of domain structure, make sure www version of your site is properly redirected to non www version to avoid WordPress duplicate issue.
Ex: http://www.wphostingdiscount.com —- >> http://wphostingdiscount.com
I also recommend you to set your preferred domain from Webmaster tool. You can learn more about it on my earlier article on: Google Webmaster tool Preferred domain setting.
From now on, when ever you are setting up a new WordPress blog, make sure you use a SEO friendly WordPress permalink structure than any random permalink. If you have any query regarding WordPress permalinks, do let me know via comment.
If you enjoyed reading this article, feel free to share it on Facebook and Google plus and don’t forget to check my WordPress guide for more such tips.
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Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 1210 articles.
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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree as well on using the Postname as the permalink. In my experience with reading content that has permalinks with date is that if the content is published about 2 years back, I will not completely take the advice from the post simply because I believe there is a better and newer content out there. As a result, keeping the date away is a good way to give reader the impression that the post is not outdated. After all, there are posts that hardly gets outdated such as Tutorials, How to and fundamental tips.
@Alan I agree with your statement on using dates..As it outdate content even after a month…It’s same as showing date’s in SERP’s …When your evergreen content is outdated because of presence of dates…
I also use %postname% in the url structure. Its not only good for SEO but also makes us easy to remember the url.
Good advice on using permalink , I have used .html the end of %postname% so it look like a simple html file , I had some old pages but didn’t change the .htacces file for redirect instead i Used redirect plugin for implementing 301 redirection to new pages. Its very easy when you have large number of pages to be redirected.
@Prabir
I tried redirection plugin almost year back and it’s powerful and does the job pretty well.. Though the only reason I prefer .htaccess method coz, redirection plugin increases the size of database by a lot..
You can check that and confirm me for the same by using wp db manager plugin… Hope they have made some changes now.!!
%postname% is the best permalink structure. Earlier I used to prefer %postname%.html, but , the former one is shorter.
Hi,
Looks interesting to me, however, I’ve been running a blog since 2007 and have the permalink in the form of / YEAR/MONTH/POST NAME, changing to only /POST NAME will it affect the SEO of my Blog ?
What will happen to the earlier links indexed in google and will I need to rework on my sitemap.xml files and on my webmaster ?
Thanks
Sunith
@Sunith
You need to implement 301 redirection for all such old links..!!
Yes, SEO will be affected a little, atleast I have noticed it in my case…
You don’t have to worry much about sitemap..You can simply regenerate sitemap and submit it..!!
Also use broken link checker plugin and fix the redirection of interlinked post..
You can refer to this guide: http://wpfreesetup.com/86/how-to-change-wordpress-permalink-with-301-perma-redirection/
Also make sure to take a database backup before making this change.
why post id and why not date for news website
@Ved Refer to first comment and you will realize why dates are not suggested.
I’m using %postname% in my blog’s URL since I have read it’s benefit in your blog’s articles. My blog’s success credit goes & only goes to SML.
Glad to know that Irfan..
You might like to check this out: http://www.facebook.com/Shoutmeloud/posts/10151109734926675
but i have migrated my blog from blogger – so my permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html any solutions ?
@Technikant
Same as I explained in this article: http://wpfreesetup.com/86/how-to-change-wordpress-permalink-with-301-perma-redirection/
You need to take care of 301 Perma-redirection and use Broken link checker to fix all internal redirection…
I also believe that %postname% is the best permalink structure you can go for, I have used it on 20+ blogs.
I found that all Facebook share link will become error 404 after change permalink link, seem nothing can do of this.
@Techgravy
There is a way but it requires little bit of coding…If you wish to save your Social media counts…
http://encosia.com/preserving-social-sharing-counters-through-a-url-change/
And if you talking about 404 for earlier shared link, it should not happen as we are doing a 301 Perma-redirection.
To me using categories is essential for SEO after Google Penguin Update. I would recommend all my fellow bloggers to be careful when creating meta tags and make sure the targeted keyword appears somewhere in the beginning of the permalink as Google now matches title and permalink structure to return a user with relevant results.
Really awesome and detialed review regarding permalinks. Yes no doubt “post name” permalink is a lot better and easier to remember. Thanks !
A very great post Harsh.Can making of this permalink works with the low end mobile phones ? All I’ve learned regarding url, is simply copying and pasting an available url.Doing so enables me to post anything via sms ,email,BBO to fb., twitter or elsewhere. I would hope to take a close look on both hyperlinks and permalinks creation.THANKS
has anyone switched from an html site where you go from pages.html to wordpress permalinks? do people typically setup 301 redirects for all their html pages or convert their permalinks to html so there is no need for redirects?