No Comments Written by Robert on July 30, 2008 – 3:10 am

Long, dynamic URLs are not just unattractive to Web site visitors; they are also more work for the search engines during the crawling and indexing process.

The Permalink Redirect plugin addresses this issue by allowing you to create permanent redirects that essentially mask your dynamic URLs, making them appear to be static. These URLs are not only easier for the major search engines to crawl; they are also far easier for your regular Web site visitors to link to from their own Web sites. These new URLs appear static and contain your target keywords, further enhancing your on-page optimization efforts.

Effectively using your keywords in your URLs gives you the added bonus of having another section of your Google search result listing highlighted with bold text.

If a user performs a Google search using keywords you included in your URL, the keywords appear as bold in the search-engine results pages. This can prove useful by enhancing your click-through rate from the search results page to your Web site.

One of the shortcomings of WordPress from the SEO perspective is the presence of canonicalization and duplicate content issues. Canonicalization problems (in this sense) refer to the presence of multiple URLs that all return the same Web page. For example:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://example.com/
• http://www.example.com/index.html

All the above URLs would commonly refer to the exact same page. However, it is entirely possible for a Web server to return separate files for each request. This is a problem often overlooked by many Webmasters, but it can be very detrimental to your SEO efforts.

If you have 100 links pointing to a Web page, but half the links use the www version, and the other half use the non-www version (example: www.example.com versus example.com), your backlinks are being spread out over two separate URLs, and you are losing out on the weight that each of those links pass to your Web site. This can also lead to duplicate content issues, or the exact same text appearing on multiple Web pages.

If the search engines crawl your site and find the exact same content at six different URLs, which one will they rank for your targeted term? Which version will your visitors link to? There are no certain answers to these questions. Your best bet is to make sure you have all your permalinks and page URLs in order from the beginning to remove any of these issues.

Thankfully these issues with WordPress can be sorted out easily by the addition of the Permalink Redirect plug-in. This plug-in keeps your link architecture clean and ensures that each page is accessible only through a single URL. It also redirects all variations of a URL to the correct version.

Competition for top organic rankings can be fierce. In fact, if you do not ensure that your site is properly protected from these potential canonicalization and duplicate issues, other less-ethical Webmasters may use those flaws against you.

By setting up links to the alternate URLs of your content, your competition can potentially create duplicate content problems within your Web site and hinder your ability to rank well on the major search engines. If you are not using WordPress, visit www.apache.org to learn more about creating your own custom .htaccess file, which can handle your canonicalization issues. By solving your canonicalization issues, you can in effect prevent duplicate content within your own Web site from ever becoming a problem or vulnerability.

Fixes for avoiding duplicate content should ideally be in place before your first piece of content goes online. However, applying these fixes to an existing site, along with a comprehensive sitemap, should be enough to resolve any issues within a few weeks, depending on how often the search engines index your Web site.