Google says don’t use pretty permalinks!
We all love our WordPress pretty permalinks, don’t we? Aside from making our blog post links a lot more readable for other people, we’ve always believed Google favored them over the obscure dynamically generated URLs. Well Google has set the record straight in a recent entry at their Webmaster Blog.
While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
Here are Google’s recommendations:
- Avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static
- Keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic)
Does that mean we shouldn’t be taking advantage of WordPress’ built-in URL rewriting system just to avoid penalties in the search engine optmization department? I’ll take readability over PageRank anyday, thank you very much.
WordPress 2.6.1 Beta 1
WordPress 2.6.1 Beta 1 is out. You might want to grab it now, or wait until an official release arrives, which Ryan Boren says will arrive around the time of this year’s WordCamp San Francisco.
Here’s another tip from him:
With 2.6.1, we’re continuing our trend of releasing a dot one release about a month after dot zero. We want to get fixes for the inevitable dot zero bugs into your hands without a long wait. If you’re happy with 2.6, you can ignore 2.6.1.
There are over 50 fixes, a lot of which address the typos in code and major bugs—like the 404 error that turns up when your permalink structure is /index.php/%postname%/.
