Tech Tips, News and Tribal Knowledge

There seems to be near universal agreement among bloggers and search engine optimization (SEO) experts that the default permalink structure in WordPress is not optimal for SEO.  While I don’t know where this belief originated, I do know that a presentation by Matt Cutts at WordCamp 2007 lent further support to this notion.  Matt is on the Google search team and his opinion carries a lot of weight.  Being the suspicious curmudgeon I am, my stated position is: “saying it doesn’t make it so.”

I have yet to see anything other than anecdotal evidence that changing your “ugly” permalinks to “pretty” permalinks has any significant positive effect on page ranking.  In fact, the reverse may be true, especially for established blogs with many indexed posts.

I have searched the web high and low and have yet to find any credible empirical study on the SEO effects of  permalink structure.   Most of the information I have garnered is purely opinion without much evidence to back it up.  It’s basically an “everyone’s doing it, so it must be right” attitude.  So, always rooting for the underdog, I’d like to put up a short defense of ugly permalinks.

1) Ugly permalinks are short and based at the root of the domain.

Custom permalinks are available in many formats, however, some defaults are offered.  Of the defaults, one of the more popular ones is the “Day and Name” permalink format: http://www.yourdomain.com/2008/07/04/sample-post/.  This URL is built using the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ tags.  Unlike the ugly permalink, this URL is three levels down from the root.  It is a bit long and it contains numbers that have no real meaning in relation to the post’s content.

Long URLs can appear as random keywords to the Google search bot unless the post title is very carefully crafted.  Google will penalize you for excessively long and random appearing URLs.  Don’t let your URLs look “spammy.”

While this popular custom URL format isn’t inherently spammy, consider the post: http://www.yourdomain.com/2008/07/04/if-i-have-to-listen-to-my-mother-in-law-complain-one-more-time/.  When reading it, it makes sense, but to a search bot, it really doesn’t contain any useful keywords.  I think with that post, the ugly permalink of: http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123 is more than sufficient.

2) Ugly permalinks offer an absolutely unique post id.

One of the major advantages of ugly permalinks is that they ensure the post title doesn’t have to be unique.  For most people, this is not an issue, but consider the potential problem if you have multiple authors on your blog.  It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that your authors will try to create posts with duplicate titles.  The use of ugly permalinks make this a non-issue.

On the question of duplicates, one thing I haven’t been able to ascertain is whether using ugly permalinks can help eliminate duplicate content issues.  With the exception of data added after a trailing “/” as in ?p=223/xxx, no other invalid URL will return a page with ugly permalinks.  All invalid requests return a “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” message.  With the custom URLs I have tested, the behavior is somewhat different.  It seems that any characters added after, or removed before the post name will redirect back to the post or the home page.  I’m undecided if this is the behavior I want, especially when trying to eliminate duplicates whenever possible.

I’m not sure how search bots interpret this.  Is this seen as duplicate content if someone links to you with an invalid URL?  I need to do some additional research to determine exactly how this situation is handled.

3) Ugly permalinks are immune from changes in category or post titles.

Many people use /%category%/%postname%/ format.  This can be a real nightmare if you ever decide to change your category names or structure.  All your indexed content at you favorite search engine is invalidated.  You can certainly use a redirection plugin, but that’s a real pain if you have many posts.

Post title edits, category changes, etc., do not affect ugly permalinks in the least.

4) Nobody cares about the URL anyway.

Who cares what the URL contains?  Most people find a site from a search engine or web link.  While it is probably somewhat more difficult to remember  http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=234 than http://www.yourdomain.com/my-receipe-for-bundt-cake/, who really want’s to type that in anyways?  It is much easier to bookmark the original link, or just go back to Google and google it again.

I have opted, at least for the time being, to stick with my ugly permalinks.  Unless someone can prove to me pretty permalinks have a significant SEO effect, the ugly ones seem just fine.  Your ranking is not about what’s in your URL, it’s about what’s in your post and what other sites think about your posts.  Stop worrying about permalinks and create better content that people want to link to.  That’s how page rank is built.

If I’m full of baloney please educate me as I don’t want to be the last person left using the uglies.

- A permalink heretic.