Permalinks and Google spam penalties

netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 4 months ago

I notice permalinks converts the title of each post into a subdirectory URL. When these get really long, resulting from long titles, is it possible this could trigger the spam filters of Google or Yahoo? I figure excessively long directory names in URLs might give the appearance of keyword stuffing or spam software. If I use permalinks, should I keep my post titles short to avoid this problem?

Some people claim wordpress’s default query strings that contain ‘?’ are not as SE friendly as permalinks, but could permalinks also come at a risk? Before I enabled permalinks, I did notice google indexing the default wordpress URLs with no problem.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 32 total)

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Mark (podz)
(@podz)

18 years, 4 months ago

I don’t recall anyone posting here with permalink problems related to SEO.

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

I did some Google searches for “Google WordPress” and found some alarming pages about WordPress and spamming.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/196220&tid=217

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/2106

I know I’m doing my best to maintain a clean blog, but I’m sure like any web publishing tool, some people will abuse it. The issue seems to be mostly concerning Google Adsense. Like many people, I have been running Google Adsense ads in my Sidebar but I’m wondering if maybe it’s not worth the risk.

Mark (podz)
(@podz)

18 years, 3 months ago

Those two threads refer to old, very old news.
They also have nothing whatsoever to do with permalinks.

Ryan Duff
(@ryanduff)

18 years, 3 months ago

I get very good SEO from WordPress by default. I have a few posts that have quickly jumped up to the first page in Google and have gotten some positive and negative feedback because of it.

One outstanding is a review of a hosting company I did, comes up on the first page amongst the rest of their links and it tends to deter people from them. They (the hosting company) are always nagging me about it.

angsuman
(@angsuman)

18 years, 3 months ago

> Netdetective
The news you pointed out is about WordPress author Matt’s (mis?)use of this site and its Google PR in the past, since rectified.
Please read the news items before quoting them 🙂

It has absolutely nothing to do with the WordPress software itself or permalinks.

If you are honest then you have nothing to fear from Google or any other search engine, permalinks or not. You can always appeal a wrong decision. In my experience and from what I heard Google plays fair.

Jonathan Landrum
(@jonlandrum)

18 years, 3 months ago

Well, if super-long URL’s resulted in bad PR, then what about super-big sites that have multiple levels of folders and pages? They couldn’t very well be penalized for having a big site. So, no, permalinks won’t keep you from getting indexed higher, but rather will assist you in getting indexed higher because Googlebot digs orderly sites.

~Jonathan

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

I think I’ll stick with the permalinks. I had a bad experience with “Rankingpower” software-generated doorway pages that used long keyword-stuffed page names, so I think seeing the long permalinks alarmed me at first, and caused me unnecessary concern.

Jonathan Landrum
(@jonlandrum)

18 years, 3 months ago

Oh, you’re talking about <meta name="description" content="loads of bull here about junk that doesn't really apply to this page" /> and <title>Even more loads of bull about stuff that doesn't really apply to this page</title>. Most search engines don’t even read keyword/description tags anymore for this very reason. The <title> tag is what is responsible for the thirteen-inch-long names for your pages, though, not the permalink.

~Jon

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

Maybe I should use shorter titles.

Jonathan Landrum
(@jonlandrum)

18 years, 3 months ago

Get Optimal Title; it puts the title of the page before the name of your site. Keep your titles two or three words in length and select a right-angle quote (“»” “»“) or pipe (|) for a separator.

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

Which style of permalink is overall best choice for the purposes of Google or Yahoo in your opinion?

The date format /blog/2006/01/10/post/

or numeric /blog/archives/

Jonathan Landrum
(@jonlandrum)

18 years, 3 months ago

I use /archives/year/monthnum/day/post-name/ because I’m also using Smart Archives and the plugin requires this format.

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

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’m not exactly sure how to install it. I see in my google search results for my blog pages, the same blog title is appearing in every single one.

Jonathan Landrum
(@jonlandrum)

18 years, 3 months ago

Right, wp_title() is in the head; it’s that way on every version of WP. But you misspelled optimal_title(). I use the plugin this way: <title><?php optimal_title(); ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>. Well, actually I replaced <?php bloginfo('name'): ?> with JonLandrum.com. One less PHP call to process (don’t know if it ammounts to a hill of beans though!)

~Jonathan

Thread Starter netdetective
(@netdetective)

18 years, 3 months ago

I corrected my spelling mistake to optimal_title() but I still got a blank white page. I must be doing something else wrong.

Do you find that the
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ format ranks better on Google and Yahoo than the
/archives/%post_name%/ format?

Does the SmartArchives eliminate the need for writing to a .htaccess file? In the past, doing so has caused conflicts with functions in my site’s root .htaccess
Fred