Permalinks and Google spam penalties

Well, upgrading to 2.0 fixes a lot of .htaccess problems, in that the file is considerably smaller. The new .htaccess implements hacks I had been using on 1.5.x. Also, the optimal-title plugin requires the use of the /archives/year/monthnum/day/post-name/ format in order to work.

Oh yeah, did you make the archives in a WP “page”? The way I had to do it was to actually modify the archives.php file and link directly to it from my sidebar. I remember I had the white page issue when I tried to put the call in a WP page I created. Delete that file and go right to the source. But wp_list_pages(); won’t grab that page. I’m manually adding my pages (because it also didn’t list the home page, which is a pet peeve of mine.) I wrote about that here.

The method I am using to list my pages is this:

<li><?php if ( is_page('2') ) { ?>About<?php } else { ?><a href="/about/" title="About Stuff">About</a><?php } ?></li>

where this particular call is for my “About” page. Obviously you would change the number between the parenthesis of the is_page() call to the page you are linking to. But, this method (when you enter a string of code such as this fore every page you have) produces a list of links like this:

» Home
» About
» Archives
» Links

and so forth. The “About” link attribute is removed when the user is actually visiting the “About” page. The same is true for every page in the list. If, however, all you want is to list your pages, you won’t have to have the if/else PHP calls; you can simply put your <li>‘s with their respective links and be done with it.

~Jonathan

Jonathan,
I could upgrade to version 2.0 but I’m concerned the upgrading process won’t be seemless, and my blog might be down for a long time while I struggle to figure out why I cannot reestablish a database connection. I installed 2.0 on other domain but I see it’s considerably more complex and bloated than 1.5.

It’s been my experience so far that MySql databases are extremely fickle and prone to corruption with WP reinstallations. In the past, this gave me a lot of trouble and I ended up having to go into cpanel > MyPHPAdmin and manually drop all my database tables in order to get it working again with a new installation of WordPress.

I’m wondering if with my use of the simple format of
/index.php/archive/%postname%/
what happens if I happen to have 2 posts with the same title? Would that create a URL conflict? I don’t suppose WP automatically adds a (1), etc.. to the URL when this occurs.

I don’t suppose WP automatically adds a (1), etc.. to the URL when this occurs.

Actually, it does. In many instances WP seems to be smarter than its users ??

I’m reaching nearly a 1,000 posts on my PetLvr blog now. In my blog, I’ve been posting lots of free articles. I always search by name to prevent duplicate posting, but some think it’s clever to change their name to keep track where their articles are (I guess) from different sources.

It’s great having WP change the permalink URL automatically by adding a 1 at the end – it lets me know when I post duplicate articles and gives me a second chance to check for duplicate postings.

// Moshu .. Don’t laugh .. re: https://The-Singers.com .. if you recall I’ve been experience TONS of permalinks problems .. I tried the old ‘microsoft miracle’ method to fix it. I’ve tried everything, and wrote everything down, and then tried the links. It only worked after doing this:

– go to Options / Permalinks
– click default
– click permalink update button
– click date and name based
– click permalink update button
– click date and name based
– click custom field
– changed /%year%/%month%/%date%/ to /%category%/
( so, permalinks = /%category%/%postname%/ )
– click permalink update button

Believe it or not – that worked. I did no upgrade. I did no downgrade. In fact, I did nothing but accept the fact that my blog was going to have to live up to the default …url/?p=xxx format.

Strange, eh? Maybe that will work for someone else? I know how aggravating this permalink problem is.

permalink redirect is a very good plugin,
as SEO you have to use it ??

the best linkstructur for Serach enginees are
yourdomain/postname

but if you would like to change your linkstructure
use htaccess with a redirect permanent to the new uri

to optimize your lbog
try to think simple:
you click the archive “thebest”.
than give search enginess a good meta descritpion for this archive ..
not one for all,

and so on..

this are only little things..
the best is good useful content …

and..
an old seo quote:
if you have done what you can do..
sit down with a bottle of tea and wait and wait and try to get backlinks
and wait and trink tea …;)

kindly regards

Is it an acceptable practice to leave out the word “archives”?

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Fred

Sure. I use only /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and it works fine….

I am however having to include /index.php/ due to earlier .htaccess file conflicts I encountered when attempting to get rid of it. If I keep the index.php in the URL, I won’t need to monkey around with .htaccess.

Writing to the .htaccess file in WP made it so my canonical 301 redirect in my site’s root .htaccess file quit working.

What happens if I change my permalink after Google has already indexed my blog pages under the original permalink scheme? Is this ever a problem for Google?

What if I removed 404.php from my theme so that any wrong URLs bounce back to my blog homepage instead of the 404 page?

Yes, it’s a different page that Google doesn’t know about. Monika mentioned the Permalink Redirect plugin. From the site: “It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.”

If I use permalinks, should I keep my post titles short to avoid this problem?
– YES.

The optional title plugin evidently doesn’t work with my version of WordPress. 1.5.1.3. wp_title() doesn’t exist in index.php, but it does in header.php. Changing it to optional_title() turns my blog page into a blank page.
– I ALSO HAD THE SAME PROBLEM. BUT FOUND THE BELOW CODE (can’t remember the source), it’s definetly working…No need to install Optimal Plugin, just paste this code to your page..

<title>
<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(‘ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ – ‘; } ?>
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
</title>

First it prints the post’s heading and then prints Blog’s name..

See it in action RacingVideoz.com

I just inserted your code into header.php, but I’m not sure if it’s working right. I’m not getting a blank page which is good.
Thanks,
Fred

To go back to the original question…there are some who feel that long urls might be risky, but in my experience they have not been a problem. You really have to create an entire page full of spam techniques to even come close to be banned.

There is no black and white in SEO, some things are riskier than others but even then it doesn’t really mean you’ll get penalized. There are many many things that would be considered serious spam compared to long page/file titles (such as hidden text).

As someone else mentioned the best optimized permalink structure for file names is ‘yourdomain/postname’. The more folders a file address has in it the less importance search engines give to it…but there are so many other factors that can outweigh that as well (age of the site, amount of content on site, number of links to specific post and the site, etc).

All of these elements build up to help you achieve ‘authority’ status. The most authority you have, the more often your posts will get top ranking.

As a side note…I’m personally having some troubles with the new 2.0 upgrade and permalinks. If you’ve got a large site and use permalinks I would NOT recommend upgrading just yet.

The new version must be iffy depending on the user, because I haven’t had one ounce of trouble out of it. Although, my site is a microbe compared to many of the blogs around here!

Dreamshop,
I have noticed a reduction in SE traffic to my blog pages since I was using index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
so I tried switching back to just index.php/%postname%/
Somebody in a different thread told me WordPress automatically adds a (1) (2) etc.. to a postname when more than one have identical names.

I earlier upgraded one of my blogs to the new version, but not without major hassle. I had to delete my entire existing wp files, then drop all my database tables in MyPHPAdmin in order to get it to work with the new WordPress version. Re-establishing a database connection can be a major pain. I think I’ll keep my existing version 1.5 since it’s working fine and doing exactly what it’s supposed to. I’m of the philosophy of “don’t fix something that ain’t broke.”

One thing I dislike about the new version is it’s complexity over the previous version. It’s a huge jump in size to the next version. There’s about 10 times as many files and file folders to install.