Few months back, Blogspot team added a new set of Advanced Blogspot SEO features which are more than just welcome SEO for a Blogger blog. Though, one thing which I still missed seeing in that update is, option to use custom permalink in BlogSpot. This is one feature, which actually create lots of difference for the SEO of your blog and finally we have Blogspot permalink options available. Though, before we move ahead and learn how to use it for better SEO of your Blogger blog, lets learn more about Permalink:
What are Custom Permalink
Let me stick to BlogSpot blog here, earlier we couldn’t control the permalink behavior of BlogSpot blogs and by default it used to remove some of the stop words and when you use long title, it removes the extending words from permalink.
Here is an example of normal Permalink vs Custom permalink:
- https://www.shoutmeloud.com/blogspot-seo-search-preference-robots-redirection-metatag.html
- https://www.shoutmeloud.com/blogspot-custom-permalink.html
In the second example, I just want to focus on Keyword BlogSpot Custom permalink, and that’s why I removed all other Keywords. Simple but very effective.
Earlier, we had no option to change or configure the Blogger permalink but in recent SEO addition, BlogSpot team announced the availibility of configuring permalink in BlogSpot blog. Unlike WordPress, we can only control permalink on single post level and not on site wide. More over, the control is limited and we can’t strip the month and year from the permalink. Anyways, still this new change makes BlogSpot SEO better.
How to use BlogSpot Permalink for Better SEO?
When it comes to Permalink configuration on single post level, the basic idea is to remove all stop words and use Keywords in your permalink. You can target short-tail or long-tail Keywords, depending upon which Keyword you are targeting. If you are new to Keyword search, You can refer to my Beginner guide to Keyword research for head start.
When you are writing a new blog post and lets say, your title is
How to do SEO of your blogSpot blog, by default BlogSpot will make a permalink like
http://domain.blogspot.com/yy/mm/how-to-do-seo-of-your-blogspot-blog.html
Instead of using such long Permalink, simple add
How-BlogSpot-SEO or BlogSpot-SEO in custom URL. Remember, your Keywords are separated by ‘–‘ (Dash).
Along with it, you can refer to our earlier guide on On page SEO, which will help you to understand how you can target Keywords in a Blog post.
For now, you can use following characters in custom URL field (A-Z) (a-z)(0-1), underscore, dash and period. I won’t recommend using underscore in permalink, and if you need more information on the same, check out this video by Matt Cutts:
Though it’s a good addition but it will create lots of issues, when you will be migrating from BlogSpot to WordPress. As there are many plugins which fixes the BlogSpot permalink to match the WordPress permalink, but after using Custom URL option, I doubt if we can actually maintain the proper redirection. More over, BlogSpot should also consider giving an option to strip /yy/mm/ from the permalink, because it just adds more character into permalink, and you lose the option to show more Keywords in BlogSpot link. Overall, I don’t meant to bash Blogspot team for adding not so perfect custom permalink option, but it’s still deserve a Welcome from BlogSpot bloggers.
- Related read:Â Moving from Blogger to WordPress experience
Another thing, which you should keep in mind, don’t change your permalink after publishing an article (on any platform), unless you can set a 301 redirection. If you do that in BlogSpot, make sure to take advantage of BlogSpot custom redirection option. You can learn more about custom permalink of Blogger blog here.
If you still have any question in your mind regarding custom URL structure of BlogSpot, do let me know via comments and I will love to answer it.
Hi,
I want to know at URL structure for blogspot. Can i remove date from post url in blogspot. is it possible to remove date?
hi harsh,
i was bit confused concern with changing permalink in blogspot, but now it is easy to edit my permalink.
thanks a lot.
ananya kaur.
That’s really sad. I really wanted to delete the date from blog posts. Thanks for conforming.
Great ..bro can u help me how to insert keywords in blog post gently
Hey,
You said that we can’t strip month & Year from post URL.
Then Please tell me,what platform you are using? As your post links doesn’t contain date stamp.
He is using WordPress.