Some of you might wonder what I mean by “Dirty Links”, first and foremost, I can assure you that I am not referring to any adult site, nor any genre of sites, but about a little wordpress tutorial.

i have noticed a lot of blogs not having their permalinks optimized, which can really affect traffic from search engine, indexing and more. Among some of my link exchange sites like this blog here are using the default setting /?p*insert post number* ex: kevinpaquet.com/?p234. Doesn’t that just look odd?

I admit, I have ones used that same setting too, before when I started blogging way back late 2007 on my first version of Kevin Paquet, but well, I’ve learned! A lot of you might be asking right now what’s the sense of optimizing the permalinks? Before I’ll proceed with that question, let me give you a short hint what a permalink is: A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems support such links. Other types of websites use permanent links, but the term permalink is most common within the blogosphere. Permalink is a portmanteau word made from permanent link. Permalinks are often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

Emphasizing the bod part of the given description, it should be something human readable, but, is something like /?p245 human readable?! I guess it’s not, nor is it healthy for the search engines. Permalinks should be something more specific, a link that would show up a descriptive text in the address bar or even the title itself like this example. But still, that kind of permalink is not advisable, since duplicate posts may happen, like for example on one day, you’d be posting about Sunday and the link would be domain.com/sunday and some weeks later, you again will post about sunday, and the link would then be domain.com/sunday-2 which just looks odd.

Having wordpress or blogger as your blogging application (I don’t know much about the others), you are very blessed by having the option to pick even more kinds permalink structure, one would be the /month/day/postname, which I am using here on my blog, creating a unique link for every article, since I would not really be posting about one topic on the same day with the same title, would I?

Why is optimizing permalinks important? It makes your blog urls more pretty towards your readers and as well as for search engines. You can easily optimize them by (wordpress instructions):

1. First of all, logging into your dashboard.
2. Hopping over to the settings
3. Clicking through to the permalinks
4. Pick which suits you best, but please, don’t use the default

Couldn’t that have been more easier? Well, it’s as simple as that. That’s just a simple reminder coming from me

Kevin once said:  Welcome everyone who's browsing my blog pages day by day checking out the latest happenings in my life and around the world. I'm Kevin Georg A. Paquet, a 17 yrO Filipino Teenager coming from Metro Davao, Philippines. I'm also the proud owner of Pinoy Teens Online, Philippines #1 Teen Site