Wordpress

Permalinks Issues~

In WordPress, we can actually create a custom URL structure for our posts’ permalinks. There are actually many types of permalink structures that you can use for your blog such as something like this:

http://www.m3nghua.com/?p=123
http://www.m3nghua.com/index.php/2007/03/16/sample-post/

And recently I found that a few blogs using permalinks like this.

http://www.m3nghua.com/sample-post/

What is this all about? It started back when I checked my site for the value of my domain. Dnscoop actually shows the result of my blog’s indexed pages in search engines. This is the result:

Google: 1,420
MSN Search: 84
Yahoo!: 792

It appears that my blog does not indexed well in MSN search with only 84 pages compared to Google which is 1420 pages. I searched over the internet for solutions but it appears that this actually related to the permalink structures. Why? It is said that MSN Search does not index well for pages with long URLs. Consider that MSN Search is the 2nd highest traffic site in Alexa rankings, this could reduce a lot of traffic to my blog.

Solutions?

I’ve changed my permalink structure to a shorter one with only /%postname%/ after the main URL. From what I’ve searched through the net, a permalink with dates on it is useless and only makes the link to be complicated for search engines. The downside of changing the permalink is that you will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid,moreover, losing visitors from other sites or bookmarks that links to you. Other than that, by doing so will hurt your google pagerank as well.

I did the changes just to test out whether my theory is true or not. There are still no proof that changing this permalink would help search engine indexing. Come to think of it, is it worth it to change the permalink just because of something that I’m not really sure of? What is your opinion then?

I actually found a plugin that can help migrating the permalink structure without losing any traffic to your site~ So stay tune!

An engineer which have a lot of interests in gadgets and technology stuffs. The blog varies from life events to gadgets reviews and hacks.

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