This is a little known feature that I believe should be documented well. If you are using IIS or do not have the mod_rewrite ability, it is possible to still have serach engine friendly URIs in WordPress. If someone was dissuaded from using WP because of this, be dissed no more! Here are the instruction from the admin page of WordPress 1.2 Mingus:
In general for this you must use mod_rewrite, however if you put a filename at the beginning WordPress will attempt to use that to pass the arguments, for example:
/index.php/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
If you use this option you can ignore the mod_rewrite rules.
I have been looking at this the last couple of days and I am not clear on why permalinks are considered so important. I know a fair bit about SEO and to my understanding my existing links such as:
http://www.andrew-hall-artist......x.php?p=52
should not be a disadvantage with Google. If it had four long querystrings perhaps but a single one should be fine.
If it had the post title in the link as well it might score a little better in the search relevance stakes – but then it would be longer.
Be interested in other info / views on this.
🙂
Andrew
Well, I have been interested in Permalinks because the Curioso PictPress plugin right now doesn’t work without them. Unfortunately my server runs of of IIS 6.0 so that is a bit of a problem (there are apps you can pay exorbinate amounts for, but the mod_rewrite code WP provides doesn’t work for them).
I’ve tried the index.php replacement for Permalinks, and it hasn’t worked for me. Maybe it’s my IIS configuration?
Andrew,
Think about it for a few minutes. The url you just quoted uses a database id column as the identifier for your post. If you upgrade your weblog backend to a different software, or do any sort of rearranging of your database, then the id number changes for that post and the url is broken or incorrect.
The beauty of well designed permalinks is that your content will never change urls, no matter what CMS you happen to be using. Also, even from a purely SEO point of view, http://www.example.com/article_title/ will be better ranked than http://www.example.com/index.php?id=555
Unfortunately, IIS doesn’t seem to identify the “index.php” in the middle of the URL as the actual page it’s suposed to feed to, so this method of creating SEF URLs still doesn’t work on IIS. The best way to get mod_rewrite funcitonality on IIS is probably to use something like ISAPI_rewrite, which has been working well for me.
nice. i was wondering the exact same thing as Andrew. I believe that question has now been answered. Now I need to work out how to use these things.