Fix your wordpress permalink structure

Ever wonder why you get very little organic search traffic from google or yahoo even though you write great posts filled with unique content?

Wordpress is a great blogging tool, but out of the box it uses a link structure that creates duplicate content and unfriendly links to your posts. This causes problems for your search engine rankings as well as user navigation.

Whether you are starting a new blog or you have a blog with 1000 posts already, there are a few easy steps you can take to fix these problems.

Why care about permalinks

Permalinks are the URL’s that wordpress creates to link to your posts.

Let’s say that you have a post titled “How to get more backlinks”. The default wordpress link would look something like this:

http://www.domain.com/index.php/2008/07/09/how-to-get-more-backlinks/

When the search engines look at this link, it is filled with extra characters that take away from the focus of the post. Your post could be about indexes, php, dates or backlinks.

If you want to tell the search engines exactly what this post is about, then use a link like this:

http://www.domain.com/get-more-backlinks/

Now, the search engines know exactly what this post is about, and they will rank your post accordingly.

How to fix the permalink problem

If you are setting up a new blog, it is easy. Just go to Settings >> Permalinks and click the button beside Custom Structure and put /%postname%/ in the box.

And when you write new posts, be sure to edit your Permalink: setting on the new post page to include only words that reflect the post content. That means leave out stop words like: “to, a, the, in”. The search engines ignore stop words, so do not use them in your link structure.

If you have an existing blog, you can also fix this problem easily. All you need to do is download a plugin such as the permalink migration plugin and follow the instructions. Note that the plugin instructions tell you to change your Settings >> Permalinks as noted for a new blog, so be sure to do that once you enable the plugin. That way, new posts will have the correct permalink structure and the old posts will be redirected from the old, non-optimized structure you were using, to the new structure.

Then, watch your server logs for google and yahoo to return to your blog and do a full site crawl. After a couple weeks, they will update all your old links shown for site:domain.com with the new links using the new permalink structure. And watch your search engine rankings with improve significantly.

After you have fixed your permalink structure, you probably should read my post on cleaning up your robots.txt to avoid duplicate content.

NOTE: in order to modify your permalink structure, you need to have an .htaccess file in the root of your wordpress directory, and you need to have the correct permissions set on the file. For details instructions of how to set up your .htaccess file correctly, please see this wordpress document.

Enjoy !