Blogging Tips: How To Use Permalinks The Right Way For SEO

Everton | Feb 07, 2007 | View Comments


I manage the BrainBlogger charity blog for free as one of my community projects, and a while back after I changed their theme they got the following email from Google News who includes them as a source:

However, after some investigation, we’ve found that our crawler is having trouble including some of your articles in Google News. In order for Google News to include articles, each article must hyperlink to a page dedicated solely to that article, as your site does. Yet, when the headline on this page is an active link, we often have difficulty crawling
it correctly. For example, the headline “Anti-Stigmatization: Family Doctor or Psychiatrist?” is an active hyperlink on this page:
http://brainblogger.com/2006/06/15/anti-stigmatization-family-doctor-or-psychiatrist/ .
Making these headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will index all of your your articles.”

I’m pretty certain that the bit in bold applies to other crawlers, which means that the majority of blogs aren’t getting crawled fully.

I was stumped on how to fix this and then I remembered what Blogware, my old blogging provider, do with their default templates. Instead of adding an active link to their title they place a small icon with the permalink next to the article title. Look at the blog of TuCow’s (who own Blogware) Business Development Director Peter Ejtel for an example. This way crawlers are happy, as well as still providing an easy way for readers to view the article

I’ve just done the same to my template as the reasons why Blogware do this are clear to me now. I’d recommend that all bloggers implement the same change in their templates, for those crawlers like Google News (and probably many others) that this will affect. It’s such a small change, but it could have a significant impact on your traffic.


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About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

  • @Sumesh

    I used to do this (you may note this post was made over a year ago), but I ditched it as google seemed to have adjusted and it was making it hard for users to follow
  • And yet you do not do this on your current theem.
  • Permalinkingin is important, but my links are hard coded. Google can follow this?
  • It's quite simple. Don't hyperlink your article titles and instead put the hyperlink/permalink in a icon or somewhere else next to or near the title
  • Hi, I'm really interested about this article.

    But I'm a novice about php and WP, so could you kindly post a demo of what I have to remove, or move, ..... in a few words, give some examples to novices like me if possibles, thank you.

    yours in deepness
  • Now to figure out how to do this on Blogger. Tips anyone?
  • Great suggestion. I've implemented the necessary changes on my blog.

    This change makes sense because major news site never have clickable page titles.
  • I think it's still worthwhile on individual pages as there are so many links on the page e.g. permalinks to comments, that it might still help
  • Alright, Do you mean.. linking on the homepage, but not on individual pages will help?

    Great find
  • no, not adding the permalink to your article titles helps as it can confuse some crawlers - my permalinks are now in the icon on the left, not the title.

    All search engines want to see is a permalink they can follow.
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