Branding Rant

I made an interesting discovery today. Due to the way I have my permalinks setup, I have the same page listed twice in Google - resulting in duplicate content. Take a look at this:

As you would know from reading a previous article of mine on duplicate content, this is BAD. Fortunately, I know exactly how this occurred and how to solve this problem.

Don’t Change Categories Once Your Article is Posted

OK, this only applies if you have Categories as part of your permalink structure. As a general rule of thumb, once you have posted your article, do not make any changes to the variables in your permalink structure. For example here is my permalink structure:

/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%.html

Given this, I cannot risk changing the category of my post or the post slug of the post. Doing so may end up in sending Google to a 404 page or a page with duplicate content. You might also like to know that there are many more tags available:

• %postname% - Avoid changing the name of the post or the post slug, if you’re using one
• %post_id% - Don’t worry about this
• %category% - Avoid switching Categories or renaming Categories
• %author% - Don’t change the author of the post or their name

For the following permalink tags, I believe you just need to not change the date of posting:

• %year%
• %monthnum%
• %day%
• %hour%
• %minute%
• %second%

Of course, these should only apply if you have these tags in your permalink structure. For more info about permalink tags, visit the WordPress codex on using permalinks.

What if I need to Change My Permalinks?

Simple. Install a copy of the Permalink Redirect plugin as I discussed in my article about SEO plugins for WordPress. After noticing how much changing permalinks affects your ranking, I’m not going to change my permalink structure at the flick of a wrist. I’ll wait until I need to change a large number of posts.

When you do change it, I’d recommend minimising the number of tags you use in your permalink structure. That way it makes your pages appear more important to Google and you don’t have to worry about the small changes you make to your articles in the future.

Happy Blogging!