Google says don’t use pretty permalinks!
We all love our WordPress pretty permalinks, don’t we? Aside from making our blog post links a lot more readable for other people, we’ve always believed Google favored them over the obscure dynamically generated URLs. Well Google has set the record straight in a recent entry at their Webmaster Blog.
While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
Here are Google’s recommendations:
- Avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static
- Keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic)
Does that mean we shouldn’t be taking advantage of WordPress’ built-in URL rewriting system just to avoid penalties in the search engine optmization department? I’ll take readability over PageRank anyday, thank you very much.
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2 Comments
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Does Google Discourage the use of WordPress Permalinks? · Pressed Words Said,
September 26, 2008 @ 11:06 pm
[...] number of bloggers, including Sophia Lucero at WordPress Philippines, draw the conclusion that WordPress permalinks are harmful to PageRank. However, the specific [...]
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Joni Said,
September 27, 2008 @ 12:49 am
I don’t think using the WP’s built-in URL rewriting system to create pretty permalinks would cause a problem, SEO-wise. But for e-commerce CMS (like Zen Cart, etc.) rewriting dynamic URLs isn’t really a good idea. I have to remind my boss about that. He keeps insisting we prettify the URLs of our e-commerce sites. Heh.
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