Tag: permalink

How to Change Permalink Structure in wordpress

I know this is a small thing to many people out there, but I am writing about this for the beginners. I had also faced lot of problem in changing the permalink, when this blog was hosted in Yahoo! server.

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

To change the permalink structure, first you need to grant permission, to access the .htaccess file(It should be in writable mod). To do that, log into your hosting account using any FTP software...we recommend using "FileZilla". As it is a FREE software and a good featured one and yet so simple to use.

FileZilla-server-name-user-name-passowrd-field
Ask for the host name to your hosting support team or search in their blog. Username and password will usually be the same as the username and password of your hosting account cpanel.

After logging into your Hosting account through “FileZilla”, goto the folder, where you have installed your wordpress theme, select .htaccess and index.php files and then right click and select “File Attributes”..Now change the Numeric value from 644 to 666. This would grant the writing mode to those two files.

And there is a .[dot] in the beginning of the file name .htacess, that file many not be visible. In this case change the settings to show all the files. or you can ask about it to your web host support team.

FileZilla-index.php-file-attributes

Now you can simply log into your wordpress account and then click on the “settings” tab, and then click on the Permalinks tab.
permalinks-wordpress-setting

There choose which ever format you want your permalink to be.

If you don’t like any of those, then select the “Custom Structure”, as shown in the above image. Now specify whatever structure you want…

Make sure to end your permalink structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.

%year%
The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum%
Month of the year, for example 05
%day%
Day of the month, for example 28
%hour%
Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute%
Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second%
Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname%
Shows only the post name after your blog URL.
%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category%
A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author%
A sanitized version of the author name.

Now choose any one of these or the combination’s of these and put it  in the “Custom Structure”, and make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% .

Ex:-

/%day%/%postname%/

Now press “Save Changes” button. Thats it. You have setup the permalink structure of your choice. Congrates!

And now don’t forget to change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files to 644 again, for security purpose.

If you still face any problem with this, then it would be better to contact your hosting provoider.

And you may also feel this plugin interesting to redirect the older permalink structure to the new one’s without any hassle.

For more details about this click here.

You could also be interested in reading Permalink contribution for duplicate content.

Permalink contribution for duplicate content

We have heard of people copying our content and lot has been discussed about how to fight against it.
But today we are going to see, how our own blog will be penalized for having the same content accessible from two different URL of the same blog.

For example, if you are showing the full content of your post in all the locations like, Homepage, Archives page, and in single content page(single.php), then there is all possibility of Search Engines thinking that these contents are duplicate. Thus there is a high chances of getting penalized.

Daniel Scocco has a nice video to illustrate this concept. So take a look, before we deal with the permalinks contribution for creating duplicate content.




That was a very informative video.

Today lets take a look at some other ways, from which your wordpress website may get penalized for having duplicate contents.

This applies for those people who are using the permalink structure which includes “Categories” ( /%category%/ ).

Previously I had this http://technotip.org/%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure. I had thought that, having the category name in the URL would help the search engines, as they might consider it as a keyword to that article.

But later I realized that, there is a huge drawback from using such permalink structure. I realized this, when I typed the URL of one of my article wrongly and was still able to access that article.

I had an article at http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ and I had typed the URL wrongly as http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ , but to my astonishment, the article just showed up. With confusion in my mind, I just had a quick search in Google, to see that the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ was also indexed. Now I really started worrying, if all other posts had the same problem. So searched again for other posts, but everything was OK with other posts. Then why this problem with http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ ?

I just went to my wordpress Dashboard and saw that I had got a link back to the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ from some blog and Google had indexed it(as the article was accessible at that wrong URL, so no fault of Google here).

Now I continued the search, and saw some other blogs using the permalink structure similar to my blog. Now I just changed the Category name and tried to access their posts, to my wonder, they were also accessible. And many of those sites did not have the nofollow or noindex in their category section. Thus, those sites are in danger, of getting penalized.

If you are also using the permalink structure
http://yoursitename.com/categories/postname/ then just change the “categories” name to any name you like(it may be anything that exists or not exists in your category list) and hit enter. You will still be able to access the article.

This can be solved
1. By having the permalink structure http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .
2. Redirect it to the original post.

Changing the permalink of your blog.
Just change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files in the root directory to 666.
And then login to your wordpress account and click on settings then on Permalinks option and now select Custom Structure and put /%postname%/ and finally click on Save Changes button. This will make your permalink structure as http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .

And redirecting the URL to original URL can be done by a number of plugins out there. Just click here to have a look.

Note: As all those articles are placed in one or the other categories, introducing the nofollow or noindex to your categories section will make the article inaccessible to search engines and finally you will end up with no search engine traffic.

I have heard most of the times that, many blogs have good page ranking in the beginning, but after sometime those rankings will drop and will keep on dropping with time. This is because as time goes and your number of posts increases, the number of duplicate contents are also increased. Thus, search engines penalize your page ranking over time.

The final thing to be kept in mind is that, always remember that your goal is to make sure that your posts or articles can be accessed in full from only one location inside your site.

Following these simple and effective tips will surly yield good results in the long run.

What do you think about duplicate contents.Have you also encountered with the same problem? And do you have any other solution for this kind of problems? or have you encountered any similar problems? please share it with us, in the comment section.