Ok Newbies. I keep getting emails about this issue. Some of you don’t know what permalinks are. Permalinks are the “permanent links” of the posts that you write for you blog. The URL you see next to my “bloggernoob” favicon is the permalink of that particular post. The default setting for your wordpress permalink is something ugly. It usually looks something like “http://www.bloggernoob.com/?p=123” As you continue to learn how to blog, you will find that it’s best to change your permalink setting ASAP.

The default permalink isn’t just ugly, this can end up hurting you in google search. Google doesn’t like numbers. The web crawlers wants your site to have a lot of letters. They want to crawl real words, not just ugly alpha numeric code. That’s why, you should make sure that your wordpress permalink structure is set to “custom” right when you set up your blog. If you don’t set it up in the beginning, you could end up with some missing links when you change your link structure later. I had to deal with this issue after a couple months of blogging. It was a major pain in the arse.

It’s a quick and easy fix, something that is obvious, but since i’ve been getting a few emails about this issue, i decided to right another post about it. This time, i will include some screen shots. Newbies love screen shots.

Login to your wordpress admin. Hit the “settings” tab and click on “permalinks” Click on custom. You can select any one of the other link structures beside default.

I think having your post title and date is probably best. To do that, insert the code
( /%postname%/%day%/ ) This reduces the numbers portion of the link and limits any link confusion. If you just set it to show the post title, you might have problems with two different posts with the same link.

This is simple enough, but if you still find yourself having trouble with your permalinks, shoot me an email at admin@bloggernoob.com

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