WordPress: search engine friendly?

Google doesn’t care about the pages being dynamically created by PHP rather than being static html. It will happily index your site. Well, it does mine anyway – for what is essentially a frivolous site for my own entertainment, I get quite a few alarmingly high placings from Google. Some of my posts are reviews of books, DVDs, etc, and I’ve found myself in the top three to five hits when googling on the titles.

Google “sees” the same thing visitors do – pages which link to other pages in your site. The back end technology doesn’t matter at all…

WordPress is very much search engine friendly if you start using permalinks instead of query strings, which is the default.

Search engines like Google only access limited amount of query string based url’s to avoid being stuck in infinite loop. It is described in their web master faq.

Yes, your individual post pages will be accessible to all search engines including google, except for the limitation with the default scheme as noted above.

BTW: MT also suffers from the same issue, many people are not aware of it. Using some kind or permalinks (non-query string based) solves it.

There are two approached to permalinks. One using htaccess, one without. I prefer without using .htaccess.

If you decide to go with permalinks consider using it without embedding date which IMHO only makes it uglier without adding value.

Thanks for the reply. I set up my WordPress site to use permalinks WITH .htaccess. But isn’t WordPress just using the url as a pointer? Isn’t the page still contained in the database?

The googlebot and other search engine bots will run through your website just as any visitor would, they will go through all the links which are indeed pointers which are directed to appropriate PHP files with queries that cause the information to come from the database.

But once the information is presented, they snapshot the information and catalog it. When you do a search for information on Google’s website they are bringing the information their vast database of knowledge. They also have a cached version of your pages.

Having static information doesn’t lead to any better search-results as opposed to pages created dynamically. I think your confusion lies in just the fact of how you understand search engines to work.

Regards

Yes, the page is still contained in the database. The URL is a virtual URL, but it is a URL nonetheless.

Thanks for the clarification. Most appreciated.

> I set up my WordPress site to use permalinks WITH .htaccess. But isn’t WordPress just using the url as a pointer? Isn’t the page still contained in the database?

As Macmanx clarified, the page is still in the db. However Google doesn’t care. All its cares is how it can access the page and it doesn’t go in much depth with pages which are accessed by query strings only because it is afraid of getting stuck in infinite loop of machine generated pages.

I can’t get the custom permalinks to work well, so I’ve never used them and I still get great search engine results with the “?p=723” type URLs. Maybe they’d be better if I was using named permalinks, but I’m more than satisfied.

YMMV.

google has indexed my entire site and them some, and is a very frequent return visitor.

also, permalinks are a cosmetic fix these days, google has absolutely no trouble with the standard structure of wp’s links. Most phpBB installs use query strings.. check Google : no issue ::::

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=psotfx+graham+phpbb+%22Before+Requesting+A+Modification%22&btnG=Search

Googlebots have been crawling over my site more than I thought they would…However, the Inktomi Slurps (Yahoo!) have been going crazy over my blog this month, with four or five times more hits from them.

I am a big fan of the simple, short “?p=000” URL.

I’m not sure if it’s WordPress URL structures, but it has been 2 months since my site is online and Google seems to have an unfounded wish to avoid it. I’ve tried, as the guy above said, the “?p=237882” URL as well as the /this-is-a-post.htm thing.

None worked =(

It will always take Google anywhere from 1-30 days to make changes to your index, so making rapid URL changes like that will actually be detrimental to your efforts. Fortunately, he just so happen to have a new Codex page for you: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_Wordpress