Shorter WordPress blog post URLs for microblogging
No need to send your blog post URLs through a URL shortener like TinyURL or bit.ly because you can just use WordPress’ built-in system! Here’s proof.
Remember Marghil’s “Plurk This” code for WordPress? It takes advantage of the post_ID permalink to use the shortest post URLs as possible, since in microblogging, every character saved counts.
Plus, since you’re using your own blog URL, followers will know exactly where your link is going, increasing the chances of their clicking on it.
Something to remember next time you promote your latest blog post on Twitter or Plurk.
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.
