Why I Use the WordPress Default Permalinks

You may have noticed that for the URLs of posts, I use the default permalinks (permanent URL for the post) provided by WordPress. Those URLs look like this:

http://patdoyle.com/?p=37

This is what WordPress does, if you do not choose a custom structure. Many people suggest that for search engine purposes, you should have the post title as part of the permalink. In that case, the permalink for this post would look like this:

http://patdoyle.com/2007/08/31/why-i-use-the-wordpress-default-permalinks/

(date posted and post title) or:

http://patdoyle.com/why-i-use-the-wordpress-default-permalinks/

(post title only) or:

http://patdoyle.com/seo/why-i-use-the-wordpress-default-permalinks/

(the category and the post title), or some other custom combination.

The reason people suggest having your post title in the permalink is that they feel that the search engines give more weight to keywords in the URL, and it is likely that some of your keywords could be in your post title, and thus they would also be in the URL.

I used to do my permalinks that way (I used just the post title and the post number).

However, I recently read at James Brausch’s blog that he has done studies showing that Google actually does not give any weight to keywords in the URL, unless they are in the domain name itself (patdoyle.com). In fact, I believe he said that Google sees it as something of a negative.

He also said that Google likes shorter URLs better than long ones.

After I read that, I remembered how Aaron Wall has his SeoBook blog structured. His permalinks look like this:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/002447.shtml

Aaron Wall is the most respected SEO expert that I know of. So if meaningless numbers in permalinks are good enough for him, then I guess they’re good enough for me.

I will not really see any results of this for a few months. It always takes a few months for a new site to see much traffic from Google. I guess I will see what I think of it after a few months.

I can see several advantages to using this kind of structure, besides any possible SEO benefit:

• I can change the titles of my posts without changing the permalinks. So if I decide to change a title, it will not hurt the links that are already pointing to the post with the old title.
• I can change the category of my posts without hurting the permalink. If I had the category as part of the post, I couldn’t do that.
• I can change the date of a post without changing the permalink. Having the date in the permalink is not a good idea anyway, because it just adds length without really adding anything valuable.

So I have made my decision on permalinks for this blog. When you start a blog (if you haven’t already), you should think about this issue too. It is a lot easier to change your permalink structure before your blog gets going.

Have a great Labor Day weekend (if you are in the U.S. – otherwise, just have a great weekend)! I will post again on Tuesday.

Update: Aaron Wall clarifies his views on permalinks.

- Pat Doyle