Why use permalinks?

forceagainstsomething
(@forceagainstsomething)

18 years, 9 months ago

Hey all,
This is my first post. I setup WordPress about three nights ago and I’m really impressed so far. I have one small question though. Why use permalinks instead of the default method WordPress uses? As far as I can tell, the permalinks would not be any easier for someone to remember, and when the post is linked from somewhere, the user doesn’t even see what the URL is.

I see everyone using them though so there must be a reason why.

– Sean

P.S. Is there a plugin to add to the quicktags bar? I have bits of code that will go into every post I make, and I would love to be able to click a button and insert that custom code.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

DianeV
(@dianev)

18 years, 9 months ago

First, blog software publishes *current* posts to the home page, and *also* to a permanent page containing that post, which is where people will find older posts that have moved off the home page. That’s what the permalinks are — links to the permanent pages.

Whether you use the database-y URLs or the “prettified” URLs for your permalinks is your choice.

corefx
(@corefx)

18 years, 9 months ago

lets say you have a contact form. Would you like it to be located at

http://www.yoursite.com/page=8729834723746732685

or would you like

http://www.yoursite.com/contact/

Thread Starter forceagainstsomething
(@forceagainstsomething)

18 years, 9 months ago

Good point corefx, I wasn’t thinking into the future. I’ve got about 20 post right now, so the numbers in the link are small. I suppose it could become a hassle as the post get into the hundreds.

Thanks!

– Sean

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

Volunteer Moderator

18 years, 9 months ago

Yet another reason:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_Wordpress#Permalinks

Thread Starter forceagainstsomething
(@forceagainstsomething)

18 years, 9 months ago

Macmanx, yet another good point. I knew there had to be a reason why everyone was using them.

Thanks.

– Sean

angsuman
(@angsuman)

18 years, 9 months ago

There are some obvious advantages to using permalinks. One which is often not mentioned is that Google indexes only a limited amount of query string based url’s from a website to avoid falling into an infinite loop. With lots of posts in your blog, it may start to become an issue where some of your posts fall out of Google index.

The other benefit is with permalink url’s you can understand the topic of the post just by looking at it. Often I include the bare url in emails knowing that people would understand the subject just by looking at the url.

Did I mention better SERP 🙂