Wrong permalinks?
I recently stumbled across an old blog post detailing how SEO experts were handing out wrong advice regarding Wordpress permalinks.
Usual SEO-friendly URL
The conventional practice is to write an SEO-friendly URL that features your keywords and the structure of the URL would be your category structure. More often than not, the keyword part is simply the post title. We all know about this and most bloggers do it. In blogs, the URL for each blog post is called a permalink, because, well, it is a permanent link!
Arguments against keyword permalinks
In criticising this permalink structure made up of keywords, the main arguments against that was speed and reliability. A convoluted explanation was given, revolving around Wordpress, its database structure and plenty of other technicalities that would result in the server spending a long time to look for a particular post because that post can exist in a number of locations and on very big blog sites, the Wordpress server might even crash. The end result being underimpressed readers who would leave the site because it takes too long to load or crashes down.
Naming and shaming SEO experts
Next in that post was a dedicated part on naming and shaming ‘SEO experts’, including Matt Cutts from Google, who recommended the conventional approach and on how they were all wrong. Followed concrete examples and citations on when they made their so-called wrong recommendations.
But where is SEO in the explanation?
While I am not going to argue whether the argument is correct or not as I am no expert in these technical matters, I will certainly argue against the author’s spin on it. His arguments on speed and reliability have nothing to do with SEO! That’s all there is to it.
He criticises SEO experts about an explanation having nothing to do with search engines. HE was just looking for an excuse to attract attention by naming and criticising big names. SEO is all about bringing traffic in via the search engines. It is not about improving the customer experience, however important and crucial that is. If you want to colour your font yellow on a white background, is this an SEO sin?
As a final note, Wordpress has announced that it has solved the technical issue that caused SEO-friendly permalinks to slow down a site.
