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Change the WordPress permalink structure to the best format, and yes it’s a little bit scary :D

Posted by Daniel - 10,433 Views

Today this blog is about 2 months old. It is only 2 weeks ago when I began to put more attention on how search engines see my pages. Let me be honest with you that at this moment the search result from this blog on Google looks bad.

Speaking about search engine result, I think it’s related to what we call as Permalink Structure. It’s a URL path structure used to access every resources/pages on your site. If you use WordPress as your blogging platform you must be familiar with this term.

I had posted similar article titled “Something is wrong, the Google Search Result from my blog looks bad“. Listed there are several steps I had been done to get a better search engine optimized pages. You know what? By writing that post, actually I am waiting for someone who understand this stuff to give opinions about my todo list. And yes, I got lucky.

A friend from Netherlands, his name is Oeroek had posted very-very helpful comments on that post. His comments are useful for someone who new to this matter like me. One of his suggestion is: I should change my permalink structure from the current one to another pattern with less noise in it.

I agree with him in this matter because based on my recent search, his suggested permalink structure is the best one according to many sources. But I had put a tiny addition to the permalink structure, I had replaced the trailing backslash with “.htm” just because I want it to be recognized as a webpage instead of a subfolder. If you want to look more, Sumesh and Karthik have an overview why this permalink structure considered as the best one.

The best permalink structure for single page (most people in the neighborhood don’t deny it) can be seen on the address bar. And the format looks like the following.

You can set the permalink structure from your WordPress [Dashboard] - [Options] - [Permalinks] - [Custom Structure] textbox.

So which one is scary? :D OK, here is the list of scary things by changing the permalink structure (before I realized there is a solution for these scary things):

1. I will have duplicate contents. The pages from this blog has been indexed by Google, as we know they have my pages with my previous URL structure, and when their bot crawls my blog on the next visit - compared to pages they already have on their cache - they will find 2 pages with the same content but having 2 different URL structures.
2. My in-post-links will go to 404. All of my in-post-links which are pointing to the pages on this blog will not work because I use the previous permalink structure for those links.

There is a solution for those scary things. One solution. And I realized it after Oeroek told me about this:

The problem with duplicate content is that Google needs to know which page is the original and that both pages may have their own backlinks, splitting their voting power.

That is why you use a 301 redirect. This means a permanent move and states to Google that the 301 source is the old page and the 301 target is the new page. All backlinks, pagerank, etc, will be directed to the 301 target.
So using .htaccess the correct way, with a 301, does not lead to duplicate content.

“301 redirect” is the keyword! And of course it should be applied in .htaccess file. So this is my .htaccess file if you curios to see it.

OK, at this point I had sucessfully changed the permalink structure of this blog. Will it give me a better result or will it give me the opposite? Lets waiting for the effect to come :)

If you need a fast solution to change your permalink structure, you can use plugins designed to do it for you. There are many options but Andy Bailey said that a plugin called Permalink Migration Plugin is a good one.

As usual, if you find anything you think it’s incorrect, please let me know. I welcome you with your thoughts. And once again thanks to Oeroek for his great suggestions.