The above screenshot from the Weberz’s Google Analytics shows that we had 28 visitors from Google organic search results, however now we have no way of knowing which phrase they typed in to find us. This makes it impossible to find out what keywords the users typed into the search results to find your site. Probably more important than that, it makes it impossible to figure out which important keywords or phrases your website might not be ranking for. 

What happened? Why the change?
A few weeks ago Google changed their services to providing secure, via SSL/HTTPs, search results to their users who are logged in to Google services. When making that change from non-secure to secure browsing for each results for those users, they also made the decision to remove this keyword data from the search results presumably to provide more privacy to those logged in users. Many website owners would argue that those users wouldn’t care about that data, or even know what it is, but Google is determined not to share the information.

So why did Google make this change? It comes down to two reasons.  The first is obvious, by adding secure browsing to search results Google can claim that they are providing a better, more secure, service to those users. They certainly are. The second reason is so Google can keep that data and only share it with businesses, and website owners, who participate in their advertising programs. That’s right, Google still shares this information with their advertisers. If Google really wants to be protecting their user’s privacy, they wouldn’t be sharing the information with their advertisers.. but that’s a different story for a different article.

So where do we go from here? How do we monitor this data?
As site owners we will need to figure out how to work around this problem to continue getting the information we need to make our sites better. To track whether or not our keywords and phrases are ranking well we’re going to have to go back to using tools that check the search results pages for links to our site.  Tools like SeoMoz Pro Tools and the SEO Book Rank Checker check the Google result pages to find out where you rank for keywords you provide.

Otherwise we will have to do exactly what Google suggests website owner do… Create and optimize our websites for visitors and let GoogleBot, Google’s search engine spider, rank us based on how good our site is. The idea is that if you optimize your site for visitors, and not GoogleBot, then you will provide a better user experience, higher conversion ratio, and more people will like and link to your site.  All of these should cause you to get better search engine rankings and result in more website traffic.

Conclusion
Mainly the purpose of this post is to inform our web hosting users of why they are seeing this lack of data in their stats programs now, however this change has caused quite the uproar among webmasters and SEO professionals. So I guess the real question of the day is.. Does it really matter that this data is missing?

Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think about Google taking away the keyword data!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Google keyword data “not provided” in stats" rel="external" target="_blank">Google keyword data “not provided” in stats

Note: Bing and Yahoo also provide webmaster toolboxes for you to use, but Google owns the largest market share of search and they are who we are going to focus on. Do not let that stop you from registering with Bing’s Webmaster Toolbox or Yahoo’s Site Explorer though, each has their own unique set of tools and all three should be used.

Registration for these services is free and simple. Register for an account with Google, Sign Up for Webmaster Tools, and let them know which website on the Internet is yours. Typically this is done by specifying the domain name and verifying your ownership/rights to the site by uploading a file to the site with a unique name. The file that needs to be uploaded can be created using Notepad in Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. Once created the file simply needs to be uploaded using FTP which is available with any web hosting provider (including Weberz).

Once you are logged in and all setup, you should see a “Home” screen that lists off any messages Google might send you and a list of sites you own at the bottom.

Messages
The messages that Google might send you work a lot like emails. Google will notify you here if they find something wrong with one of your websites, such as malware or hacked files. This can be a great tool to detect such problems should the unfortunate happen. Google will also send you messages when important changes are made to your site’s configuration.

Sites
Simply a list of sites that your Google account has access to. Many web designers will list all of their client sites here so they can resolve problems and help with SEO. If you only have one, that’s not a big deal. Clicking on a particular site name will take you to the Dashboard of the Webmaster Tools for that site.

Dashboard
The Webmaster Tools Dashboard, pictured above, gives you a quick overview of what is going on with this particular domain. It includes search queries, crawling errors, links to your website, keywords, and sitemaps. We are going to go over each of these in detail as we go along.

On your left you should have a menu that shows “Dashboard”, “Messages”, “Site Configuration”, and so on. Lets go through some of these sections and get an idea of what Google thinks of our site.

Site Configuration

The site configuration section allows us to inform Google of our preferences when dealing with our site. It also provides a method of telling Google about all the pages on our site and which ones they shouldn’t be visiting or sharing with visitors.

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an XML file that can be used to tell Google about which pages exist on our website and how important we feel they are. They provide an excellent resource to point Google in the right direction when it visits your website and also to tell Google about new pages on your site. No longer do we have to wait for Google to find the pages on its own.

We aren’t going to go into generating Sitemap files yet, that will be another post, but know that this is where they get setup and submitted to Google. Here you can also see how many pages are in your Sitemap vs the number of pages Google includes in search results.

Crawler Access
Crawler Access allows us to see and build our robots.txt file. These are instructional files for search engines to tell them what they should and shouldn’t be viewing on our site. By not specifying a robots.txt it is assumed that everything should be allowed, however for proper search engine optimization one should always be specified. We will learn more about these files later. This section also includes a spot to remove a page from the Google index. This can be useful if Google ever finds a file on your site that you didn’t want it to have access to.

Sitelinks
These are links provided to websites by Google when it thinks it has found important sections of a website that visitors will find useful. You have probably seen them before when using Google and not realized it, they are featured in the picture below. Unfortunately Google is the one who decides which sites get sitelinks and which sitelinks they get. The only power we have here is to block a particular site link from being viewed by the public.

Change of Address
This section of Webmaster Tools allows you to change your web address, domain name, for your entire site. While this probably isn’t the best idea for any number of reasons, Google still allows you to perform such an action here. The process for changing your domain is clearly spelled out in the instructions and can be done by anyone who has access to your Webmaster Tools account & data.

Settings
The settings page allows you to customize how Google reacts to your site and gives you a little control over Googlebot. Googlebot is the automated system that Google uses to find and read pages on the Internet. Here’s a quick run down of the options available to you:

• Geographical Target
  Unless there is a very good reason to change this, I wouldn’t worry about it. The geographical target allows you to specify which visitors, by country, your website is targeted at. If this is not specified Google will automatically determine this based on your domain name. Domains ending in .com, .net, and .org are normally considered globally targeted and country specific domains such as .us, .uk, or .au are specific to their respective countries.
• Preferred Domain
  Most sites on the net are available via at least two variations of their domain. These variations are with, and without, the www prefix such as weberz.com and www.weberz.com. This option allows you to specify which of these variations you want Google to use when displaying your domain name. I always opt to use the www version of the domain for multiple reasons, the largest of which is that the www prefix was specifically designed for websites. You should definitely specify which one you prefer so Google is consistent on how it displays your domain. This should cause less confusion for search users because it will always be the same.
• Crawl Rate
  Google automatically determines the Googlebot crawl rate when it finds a new site. Normally this is based on the sites importance and how often it is updated by the website owner or maintainer. This option will allow you to temporarily, for around 90 days, override Googlebot’s crawl rate to make it go faster or slower. Normally you would think the faster the crawl rate the better, however not if it causes you to use more website traffic than is allowed by your web hosting plan.
• Parameter Handling
  If by chance you have a website that uses address parameters then you can use this option to tell Google which ones to ignore. Address parameters are normally used for website code options given to the users who browse your website, they are displayed in the URL of the page address after the question mark, ?, symbol.

A common use for parameters, and one you would want Google to ignore, is a parameter used on an e-commerce site to change the sorting order of products in a list. Most website programmers will use a URL parameter to specify the users preference when a sort type is clicked. We wouldn’t want Google to use that parameter because it will simply cause duplicate content issues by having the exact same product listing available at multiple website URL’s.

Your Site on the Web

This section of Webmaster Tools lets you know what information Google has about your site. Information such as which search queries you rank for and what keywords Google thinks your site is about are available here. One of the main things to keep in mind while using this section of the site is that the data is always out of date. Google simply has too many sites to keep track of on the internet so it only updates this section of data periodically, however it’s still a good rough guideline as to what Google is thinking.

Search Queries
The search queries section shows you which searches your site returns in the results for. It provides you with an average position in the search results that you ranked and how many users clicked on your link.

Links to your site
This lists the other sites on the Internet that link to you the most ranked by the number of links. Since links are the currency of the web, this can be very valuable data. On the right the screen displays which of your pages are linked to the most. The bottom of the page shows you what text is used in the links that go to your site.

An important piece of SEO is getting quality links from other websites. The links you want the most are the links will all the following:

• Links from important sites that are about your websites topic
• Links that contain keywords or phrases that describe your site and content
• Links that go directly to a page that are about the keyword/phrase used above.

Keywords
The keywords page shows you the keywords that Google thinks are what you site is about. They are ranked in order of significance in the eyes of Google. This means that Google thinks the keywords at the top of the list are most relevant to your site than the keywords at the bottom of the list. If this list does not accurately describe your site then it’s time to work on the content on your site and the links you get getting from other websites.

Internal Links
This list of links shows you the pages on your site and how many other pages on your site link to them. Google believes that the pages you link to the most from inside of your own website are likely to be the most important pages on your site. If the list isn’t in the order that you think it should be then you should work on manipulating your on site links to make the list more accurate.

Subscriber Stats
If your site has an RSS feed, this section will show you how many users are subscribed to the RSS feed using Google tools. It’s a nice little statistic to monitor over time, however in the grand scheme it’s really not that important. This doesn’t take into account how many users aren’t using Google’s RSS tools or how many people actually read the stories/articles in the RSS feeds.

Diagnostics

The diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools lets you see where Google has found problems with your site. The problems range from malware, malicious software, being found by Googlebot on your site to simple SEO related errors that Google wants you to know about. Web designers and site owners should ensure they look at every entry in the diagnostics section to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake made when building the site.

Malware
This section is very straight forward. If Google detects any malicious software on your site, it will provide information about it here. Some web browsers like FireFox will use Google’s malware database and block user access to a site with a warning if malware was found. The only words you ever want to read on this page are “Google has not detected any malware on this site”.

Crawl Errors
This page lists off all the errors that were found when Googlebot was trying to fetch information from your site. It will list off directories which Googlebot could not access, pages that are no longer found or available, and URL’s that are blocked due to your robots.txt configuration. Site owners will want to go through every entry in the crawl errors section and make sure that the entries are supposed to be listed. A web designer doing an action as simple as renaming a page without a redirect can cause a crawl error to show up.

Hint: Never rename a page without setting up a redirect. This can cause you to loose traffic because of users who bookmarked the old page or search engines failing to remove the old page from the index.

Crawl Stats
The crawl stats section shows you what Googlebot has been up to while it was playing around on your site. It provides graphs for how many pages per day Googlebot crawls on your site, how much bandwidth it has used up while crawling, and how long it takes Googlebot to download the pages on average.

HTML Suggestions
This page can give you some slight insight to minor SEO mistakes that Googlebot has found on your site. It can list duplicate or missing Meta descriptions for pages and invalid title tag information. Since these are key on page SEO indicators, you will want to get these fixed.

That’s about it for Google Webmaster Tools. As you can see this is a invaluable tool to see information about your site in the eyes of the Google machine. Make sure to check on your Webmaster Tools data regularly to see if your SEO efforts are working in your favor. Since most of the data provided by Webmaster Tools is historical then spending an average of 30 minutes to an hour a month reviewing it should be more than sufficient.

Have you been using the search engines webmaster tools to review your site’s information already? Are you going to start now? Let us know in the comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Google Webmaster Tools: An information resource for all site owners" rel="external" target="_blank">Google Webmaster Tools: An information resource for all site owners

Every website on the Internet has a job to do. It could be selling products, sharing information, or getting consumers into a brick and mortar store. It really doesn’t matter what the job is, just that there is a job to be done. To get this job completed successfully, websites need visitors and typically the more of them the better. This is where search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing can help.

Search Engines are friends, not foes!
Search engines are not big scary monsters that should be ignored. Instead, they are more like big friendly monsters. In fact they should be any website owner’s most important friend on the Internet. Website owners should share information with search engines and do everything they can to allow search engines to find and share their content. Why? They have visitors to share and you want them to share those visitors with you. We need those visitors so our website can do its job.

Everyone has used a search engine, so we all know how they work. You type in what you’re looking for and it returns a list of pages that you might be interested in. It’s a pretty simple concept to wrap your head around. Now think about the same concept as a website owner. Those search engines are pre-qualifying traffic for those sites that it’s returning in the listings. It does so by matching what the user is looking for against the information and relevancy of the sites that the search engine knows about. Choosing to work with search engines can be huge for a website owner. If you choose to ignore them, then someone else will be getting that traffic and the sales/conversions that go along with it.

Search Engine Optimization
SEO, or search engine marketing if you prefer, is the art of modifying your site and working with the search engines to better your rankings in the search results. To be clear it’s not cheating, evil or bad in any way. Google even publishes webmaster guidelines to help you do it properly. It is simply optimizing your site to better work with search engines, hence the name. By implementing SEO techniques on your site you can make your site easier to work with for search engines. In most cases the search engines will in turn reward you with better rankings and more traffic.

Here are a few things that every website owner should keep in mind when getting started with SEO:

• SEO Requires Site Changes
  To do proper SEO on your site, it’s likely to require some changes to your content or code. It’s almost always a necessary evil. We know you like the site the way it is. However, if some changes can positively impact your visitor numbers and conversions, wouldn’t that be worth it? Since SEO will require changes to code you’ll either have to know HTML, learn HTML, or hire someone who does. There are plenty of good SEO firms out there to help you.
• It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint!
  SEO is going to take time. Results rarely happen overnight and can take months to see real positive impact. Be patient. Keep this rule in mind if your looking to hire an SEO firm. Nobody should guarantee results over night. If you’re implementing SEO yourself, take your time and get it right the first time. SEO is a long term plan.
• There is NO Quick Fix
  This one is very straight forward, there is no one thing that will fix all your SEO problems. No one can guarantee something will work. If your hiring an SEO firm to help you, they should NEVER guarantee results like a “#1″ or “Top Ten” position in the Google results. If they do, find someone else.
• Always Keep Your Visitors in Mind
  This is probably the most important of them all. As a site owner, your loyalty should always be to your website visitors. Always build your site and content with your visitors in mind first, then optimize it for search engines. Never the other way around.

Now you should understand why ignoring search engines is a bad idea and if you don’t ignore them, instead actually optimize for them, how they can help you meet the goals of your website. You have a basic understanding of what SEO is and should be ready to get started. If you’re going to hire an SEO firm to help, start by doing a Google search for “SEO Firm” or “SEO Consulting” and give a few of them a call. If your going make the SEO changes yourself, then we will be posting some good optimization techniques over the next few weeks. For those of you who are eager to get started right away, here’s a quick one for you:

HTML Title Tags:

Every page on your site should have a <title> tag in the <head> section of your website code. The contents between the <title> and </title> tags are what displays in the browser tab when visitors visit that page. The same tag contents are also used as the title of the search engine results listing when the page comes up in a visitor’s search results. Each page on your site should have a unique title specified and in a uniform format throughout the site. For example a contact us page might say “Contact Us – Website Name” and an about us page would say “About Us – Website Name”.

It should also be noted that only the first 70 characters of the title tag show up in the search results listings. Try to limit your titles to under that limit so they display properly in a visitors search results.

Do you currently implement any SEO on your website? Let us know in the comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Don’t Ignore The Search Engines" rel="external" target="_blank">Don’t Ignore The Search Engines

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a specialized art form for many users. When it really comes down to the basics, SEO is the art of manipulating on page elements and site elements to get the best possible ranking from a search engine possible. This can include anything from changing a site structure to editing page content allowing for better keyword placement.

The SEO concepts for a site are something that should be in the mind of any webmaster from the very first planning stages of a site. While it’s possible to go back and implement SEO idea at any time, you will be able to save time, money and labor by making sure that SEO concepts get done from the beginning.

A few examples of SEO concepts are:

• Indexability or Spiderability – This is the idea that search engine spiders, or bots, can reach your pages with little to no effort. Certain page elements and layouts can stop this from happening so none of your pages in up in the search results. Creating pages in javascript or flash are good examples of what can stop this.
• Friendly URL’s – This goes along the same lines as spiderability. It used to be that spiders couldn’t read URL parameters like id=432 or page=5 that are located in the url after the question mark, ?, sign. Now engines have gotten better about being able to read these but they can still cause some spider confusion. Most search engines, including Google, recommend that you have no more then two of these in any URL on the site. The best practice is to eliminate them all together.
• Robots.txt File – The robots.txt file tells spiders which directories on your site they are not allowed to visit. This is a great way to block certain sections of your site from showing up in search results. With that in mind its also extremely easy to accidentally block your entire site from the search engines. Be careful when editing your robots.txt file.
• Page Layout/Elements – Proper use of HTML elements can be a great SEO improvement for any site. Using Alt tags on your images and heading tags to layout your on page content can help spiders better understand the layout of your page. They are also great places to emphasize search phrases you wish to show up in the rankings for.
• Content – Unique and good quality content is one of the best ways to show up in the search engine rankings. When people search for terms and phrases they are looking for quality information that they were not able to find somewhere else. The best way to get visitors is to be the one providing that information.
• Keyword Placement – Notice that I didn’t say “Keyword Stuffing”! Keyword placement is the idea of working your keywords into that good quality content as best you can while still making the information valuable to the reader. Keyword Stuffing is the concept of forcing the keywords into the content as many times as possible. You want to do the first one.

What is SEM?
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which currently has many definitions. According to WikiPedia, SEM is the practice of online marketing to increase your ranking in search results pages via paid advertising. As far as I am concerned SEM is the practice of online marketing to increase your ranking in search results pages via marketing efforts other then SEO. So basically anything you do online to increase your ranking that doesn’t require you to change your website code or structure.

SEM typically happens after your website is complete and are ready to start getting traffic. A couple examples of SEM are:

• Link Building – Many search engines, including Google, determine the value of your website by the amount of links you have, among other things. Gaining links from quality/authoritative sources is a great way to increase your ranking in the search results pages.
• Social Networking – Use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg to announce and share information about your products and services. This can be a careful balancing act. It’s important to be engaged with users on these networks and bring value to the community. Not just push your product information.

So that’s it. Those are the basics. If you have any more examples of SEO and SEM tactics, please let us know in the comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing" rel="external" target="_blank">Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing

In Matt’s post he explains that all links on the page used to be assigned and given link juice in various levels based on the location of the link and the context in which it was used. Then he goes on to explain that Google, and other major search engines, introduced the nofollow attribute to allow webmasters to label a link that they did not fully trust. These nofollowed links were not to be assigned or given any link juice because of the tag. Any link juice that was to be given to them was to be reassigned to other links on the page.

Now Matt explains that around a year ago Google changed the algorithm to assign link juice to these nofollowed links but not give them the credit for it due to the tag. The link juice that is assigned to these links now goes into the large black hole that is the internet, never to be seen or heard from again.

What Matt has basically told us is that as website owners add more links to their pages, the amount of link juice that each link will get will be reduced incrementally. This reduction in link juice will happen regardless if the status of the link is nofollowed or not.

This can cause serious issues for websites that contain blogs as most blogs allow for comments to be left by their readers. Most blog systems allow those users who leave comments to also link their name on the comment back to their website. This can drastically increase the amount of links on a single page that the original blog poster didn’t originally intend to be there.

The topic of this problem did get brought up by both Matt and the users who left comments on his post. In his mini F.A.Q. on the post Matt posted the following questions and answers:

Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?
A: If you think about it, that’s the way that PageRank worked even before the nofollow attribute.

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to hoard your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Right there Matt does answer the question that allowing comments with these links does in fact lower the amount of PageRank, or link juice, that will be transferred to your other pages. Matt also states that he does not recommend that users turn off the commenting systems on their blog. I am very inclined to agree with Matt to not turn off the commenting system but that doesn’t solve the problem of those links lowering your link juice.

The other question that comes to mind is why have the nofollow tag at all now? Really if you think about it, the tag was originally designed to label a site as not trustworthy in the webmaster’s eyes. The nofollow tag can still be used for this purpose if the webmaster doesn’t mind loosing a portion of his link juice to someone he doesn’t trust. A better idea would simply be not to link to anyone who you don’t trust. After all if you don’t trust the other end of the link.. why are you linking to them?

With what we now know from Matt’s post I really can’t see any reason to use the nofollow attribute on a link anymore. As it sits you know that the link is going to cost you in link juice either way. It also seems that you trust the site enough to allow the link to remain on your site. So why not just give them the link juice? Other then the idea of not wanting to help someone else out, there is no reason not to give them the credit for the link.

The only exception I can see to that is when internet users are allowed to add links to a site without the webmasters personally checking each link. A perfect example of this would be blog comments or a website guestbook. In these cases I can understand not wanting to vouch for the site on the other end of the link, however I think a better solution would be to not allow the link in the first place.

As for my solution for the newly found problem.. I created a WordPress plugin that removes all the links from the comment authors and only enables them for users who comment more then a specified number of times. It also provides us the ability to remove the nofollow attribute from those links when they do appear so we can reward users who leave multiple comments on our blog. If your interested in getting a copy of this plugin, please visit the comment link manager plugin page.

So what are your thoughts on this new issue? Should everyone just do away with the nofollow attribute all together? Should webmasters stop allowing users to post links on thier sites? Or should we do as others have suggested and participate in some sort of cloaking, iframe, javascript solution? Share your comments below!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: PageRank Scultping Doesn’t Work and NoFollow is Worthless" rel="external" target="_blank">PageRank Scultping Doesn’t Work and NoFollow is Worthless

Let us start by giving a nice big thanks to experts in the SEO community. It’s likely because of them that there are literally thousands, possibly millions, of WordPress installations that setup with less than optimal settings. Many unsuspecting and uneducated users look to this group of experts for ideas and techniques to improve their search engine rankings and to gather more website traffic. Little do these users know that even some of the most popular people in this group of experts are handing out bad advice regarding how to setup WordPress systems.

Bad WordPress Permalinks Advice
Most of the SEO experts on the net recommend that users setup their WordPress permalinks in a very specific way. Every article on the net I have seen written by an SEO expert regarding WordPress permalinks suggests that users either use “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” for their permalink structure. This is a bad idea for many reasons, which I will cover below, yet the SEO experts continue to promote it.

In fact I was at SearchFest, a Portland SEO & search marketing conference, in March and I watched an SEO expert use this as his suggested permalinks structure to an entire room of people during a WordPress SEO session. Now I just feel bad for anyone who actually wrote down or took that advice. There are much better ways of setting up your permalink structures.

Why Are Those Permalinks Structures Bad?
Well to sum it up very simply it comes down to two things. Speed and Reliability. Thinking from the blog readers points of view these have to be the two of the three most important items that your blog can give them. The third of course being content, but that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

Let’s start off with reliability and how these permalink structures affect that. Both of these permalink structures have the first variable in the structure as a text based keyword. The variables I am talking about of course are %category% and %postname%. Unfortunately by using a text based variable you can cause WordPress to get confused when the system goes to process the request from your users. The reason for this is that there are just too many possible items it can match.

When we look at a example URL of “/blah-blah-blah/”, WordPress can run into problems when trying to match items to the request. Does it match a category, a page name or a post name? All of these text based variables use the same pattern matching so the system would have to run multiple database queries to figure out what the user is looking for. That’s not to mention the fact that the system also has to parse that request for attachments, tags, author pages and feeds which all use text based keywords as well.

Even then the system could get confused if you have a page/sub page combination that matches the slug of a category/post combination. Which one should the system load? These combinations of random keywords could easily cause WordPress to load the wrong page or post for a user which in turn makes your site less reliable in the user’s eyes.

So now compound all of the above with the speed issues. The most obvious of speed issues is that WordPress has to run all of those database queries that I mentioned above.Those are not lightweight and fast queries. They take time and delay the loading of the page that the user is requesting. How many times have you left a site because it loaded too slowly?

Another speed issue is for the WordPress author themselves. When using a permalinks structure with a text keyword as the first variable you end up causing WordPress to generate internal redirects to try and fix the issues mentioned above. These redirects are stored in the wp_options table in the database and are generated when authors add and edit posts or pages in the system.

The system is semi smart and generates internal redirects for all the pages that are loaded into the system. A simple page with a couple of attachments, whether they are displayed or not, can easily generate 11 internal redirects in the database. This is because the system needs the redirects for the page, it’s attachments, the trackback URLs and feeds that go with it. To make matters worse the system has to have a line for the redirect as it would show up in the request, the permalink for the item, and a line for how WordPress is to understand that request. So now we can double the number of lines in the database for that one post to 22 lines.

So by using the permalinks structure with the first variable being a text based keyword the system now generates these redirects upon saving a post/page and causes delays for the author. In fact there have been reports where users with 200 or so pages, with random attachments, in their WordPress installations actually causing server time outs during the generation of these redirects. This causes them not to be able to post to their WordPress installations at all.

Continuing with the speed problems, lets not give up on those internal redirects. Those internal redirects also affect the users of the website and their page loading speeds. With every page request the system has to load all of those extra redirects and process them. That’s 22 extra lines of code per request that has to be processed before the page will load for the end user. Imagine if you had a simple site with 10 pages, that’s an extra 220 lines of code. That is of course is on top of the other 125 lines of code for internal redirects that WordPress needs by default with no pages.

I took a look at one of my customers blogs who has 24 pages and compared that to his internal redirect list. His redirect list had a total of 773 lines of code that needed to be processed for every request to his blog. As you can see that 22 lines of code is a lower end figure when compared to his total number of pages. On our blog we have 22 pages and do not use one of the permalink structures above. Our blog only has 140 lines of redirect code that has to be loaded and none of those reference any of our pages individually like our customer’s redirects did.

Be advised that none of this touches on what kind of damage your doing to your server. Since WordPress is written in PHP and MySQL, all of the requests and code are processed on the server side rather then the user’s end of the connection. By adding excess lines of code for redirects and increasing your number of database queries, you are also increasing the amount of work your web hosting server is having to do. That also isn’t a good thing.

So What is the Solution?
The solution is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable. By doing this you will drastically reduce your risk of the problems listed above. Here is a list of variables you can use that are not text based:

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
• %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
• %day% – Day of the month, for example 28
• %hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
• %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
• %second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have text based variables in your permalink structures, you just need to make sure the first variable is not text based. On Weberz we use “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%” as our permalink structure.

Why Would The SEO Experts Recommend The Wrong Structure?
The reason SEO experts recommend the “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” structure is simple. It makes the URLs easy to remember and it introduces keywords into the URL string that should match the content of your post. Typically in SEO the shorter the URL the better as its easier for the users to remember. The reason some SEOs recommend adding %category% to it is because categories normally include common keywords in the name that match the contents of the posts in that category. Are these extra 2-3 keywords from %category% worth it? Not in my opinion.

A better question would be why aren’t SEO experts recommending the permalink structure of “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%”? A simple answer to that one would be because they think the URL might be too long or they are unaware of the issues I am writing about today. After all some of these problems were not introduced until WordPress 2.7 was released. Hopefully some of the SEO experts will read this article and change their recommendations to their customers.

Why Blame the SEO Experts For This?
SEO experts are the ones who always are trying to optimize their pages to get the best search rankings possible. They are likely the reason that these options even exist for the permalink structures. Always wanting to get a extra 2-3 keywords in the URL out of the %category% tag or wanting to shorten the URL to just “/%postname%”. It’s just insanity.

Of course there is always the fact that they are the only ones I see recommending this to people because of the optimization boost that it can give you. If it wasn’t for SEO, there would be no reason to use one of those permalink structures except to make things look pretty.

How Do I Know This is Real and Not Just Your Crazy Opinion?
That is a very good question. Unlike the SEO experts opinions, I happen to have the official WordPress documentation on my side. The WordPress Codex page for Permalinks specifically states the following:

“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.”

Really who is going to argue with the official documentation? Just in case you still think I might be making it up, here is a link to a discussion on the WordPress Testers mailing list thread that discusses these very issues.

Now as of the time of this writing there is a patch for part of the problem listed above. A user has provided the WordPress developers a patch via the WordPress Trac site to make the generation of internal redirects faster when authors save a post or a page. While I believe this is great, it still doesn’t solve the issue of those redirects needing to be there in the first place. Even if you generate the redirects faster, you still have the problem of having to process them with every request from a user. Seems like a band aid over a much bigger problem.

So Who Are These SEO Experts Giving The Bad Advice?
Honestly the list is too long to name everyone. There are a few key people in the community that I am going to point out anyway. Now don’t get me wrong, all of these people are extremely good at what they do and I have a huge amount of respect for them. It’s just on this particular issue, they got it wrong at some point in the past.

• Scott Hendison – Scott runs a internet marketing company called Search Commander and was the one who introduced me to WordPress. Scott also has a WordPress plugin called WordPress Core Tweaks that automatically cleans up your WordPress installation for you. Unfortunately Scott’s plugin sets your permalinks to “/%category%/%postname%” which we now know is less then optimal.
• Aaron Wall – Aaron is the founder of SEO Book – SEO Training Made Easy. SEO Book provides a number of good articles to readers about search engines and the SEO community as well as sells an ebook written by Aaron. Aaron mentioned in this comment under a blog Q&A session that he likes permalinks that are “/name-of-post” or “/2007/09/name-of-post”. At least one of them was a good format right?
• Joost de Valk – Joost runs Yoast.com a website dedicated to tweaking websites for better SEO. Joost is particularly popular among the SEO community for having great WordPress SEO advice and some of the best WordPress plugins available. In Joost’s WordPress SEO article under section 1.1 titled “Permalinks” he specifically states “I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/“.
• Michael Gray – Michael runs Graywolf’s SEO Blog a widely popular blog covering search engine optimization and search marketing news. In this thread Michael not only shares with users that he uses “/%category%/%postname%/” for a permalink structure, but also helps users solve some related permalink problems in the comments.
• Matt Cutts – Matt is head of the Google web spam team and runs a personal blog on mattcutts.com. Matt is not an SEO but he is a major figure in the SEO community. Matt recently posted the slideshow that he used at WorldCamp 2009 when discussing blogging and WordPress among other things. There was no video posted but on slide 25 Matt was obviously talking about URL structures and permalinks. Unfortunately the slide also shows users should use a permalink structure of “/%postname%/”.
• Jordan Kasteler – Jordan runs Search & Social and also has a Utah SEO Blog setup where he posts copies of his conference presentations. Jordan was the presenter at SearchFest 2009 that informed an entire room of users on how to setup their WordPress installations incorrectly. Here is a copy of his slides.. Slide 10 is obviously my favorite!

To add to the list above of people who handed out the wrong advice to users, below is a list of SEO experts that are using the wrong permalink structure on their own blogs. Since I couldn’t find anywhere that the people below had handed out advice on what to use, I didn’t want to mix them with the wrong doers above.

• Vanessa Fox – Vanessa runs Nine By Blue and previously worked for Google where she built Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately Vanessa setup a blog on Nine By Blue where she uses /%postname%/ as her permalinks structure. She even talks about changing the structure in this post.
• Adam Audette – Adam runs Audette Media a strategic internet marketing firm. Audette Media was kind enough to put up a blog where the primary poster is Adam himself, unfortunately they used /%postname% as well.
• Stephan Spencer – Stephan runs Net Concepts an SEO marketing and consulting firm. While I could find many places, including a WorldCamp 2009 presentation, where Stephan recommends users shorten their URL and create custom post slugs, I couldn’t find anywhere he actually recommended a permalink structure. With that in mind, the Net Concepts blog also seems to use /%postname% or a custom post slug for each entry which is also a text based variable.
• Danny Sullivan – Danny is the founder of Search Engine Land which is one of the largest sites on the internet for covering search engine and search marketing news. Danny’s personal blog located at daggle.com is also a WordPress blog. Unfortunately Danny setup his permalinks structure to be /%postname%-%postid% which is also not a good way of doing things.

By now you are probably asking if anyone did get this correct, the answer is Yes! I was able to find two SEO experts that actually have their blogs setup correctly and didn’t appear to give advice to anyone on how to setup their permalinks. These two great individuals are:

• Jeremy Schoemaker – Jeremy runs Shoemoney.com where he shares his experiences in online marketing. Jeremy uses a permalink structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.
• Neil Patel – Neil runs QuickSprout where he explains and discusses ideas and techniques for online marketing and social media. Neil is also using the permalink structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%. As a side note, Niel also provided the best SEO presentation I have ever seen at SearchFest 2009… If only there was a video of it.

Hopefully this article will enlighten WordPress users and the SEO community to find a new permalink structure to use and promote. While it’s certainly obvious from the points above that there are better permalink structures available, I have no doubt that some users will continue to use bad ones. From your point of view, is using one of these bad permalink structures worth it? Is the extra processing and potential load time issues worth getting a extra few keywords into the URL? Share your comments below and let us know!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks" rel="external" target="_blank">Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks