Comments on: WordPress Permalinks and Google – An Experiment

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:32:41 +0000

Jon,

That is a urlizer.com link. I exchanged a couple of emails with google.com. They said wordlog.com will not be indexed, since I “violated” some webmaster guideline. No amount of protesting on my part seems to clear that up. I guess the reason they think that way is because when this was launched, a lot of people linked to it, all at once, and so they might have thought it is a link farm or something…

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:20:31 +0000

Funny. I actually just found your site ranked on the first page of Google for “wordpress permalinks”. Perhaps it just needed more time. Generally Google will index a new websites homepage more quickly than the rest of the site. A “deep crawl” of all the pages can often take 2 months or more, depending on how many links are pointing to your site.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:07:14 +0000

Carthik: You’re right, the individual pages are not indexed. However the monthly pages are, which also use messy urls. How confusing!

By: stef

stef — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 12:23:02 +0000

Oh… Anothor point not to forget : Google does not read application/xml ot appliation/xml+html.

By: Ozh

Ozh — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:50:40 +0000

I dont understand why Google wouldnt crawl your site. My blog is crawled about daily by Googlebot, and a community site I run, which uses “non pretty url” (ie /news.shtml?12145212364562 and stuff) is also crawled more than daily. I’ve never submitted any to Google, it just came by itself following links I guess.

By: Sushubh

Sushubh — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:19:25 +0000

We use old styled URIs at: http://searchenginejournal.com/ and Google does fine.

By: skebrown

skebrown — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:49:04 +0000

Good to try an experiement every now and then, especially in the world of SEO. I hope it makes some improvement. However, I am with Paul above, my site is using the default URI’s and I have no problems getting indexed and BTW Carthik, most of the majors index more than just the index page of your blog.

I have tried a few things in the past to see what was going on with regard to SEO, pagerank and keyword padding.

Keyword Padding Test
http://skebrown.com/index.php?p=38

Blog Software IS Healthy bot-food
http://skebrown.com/index.php?p=197

I hope we see some results soon?

Thanks for the space.

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:21:12 +0000

WhatLess, Glad to have visited you!

Well, the way I look at it, I want the content in wordlog indexed, so if someone searches for help on some of the things posted here, they can find it. It is not only about the title, really

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:19:14 +0000

Chad,
I think the index is updated once a month or so.
I’d be happy to see it happen within a week.
Let’s see how it goes.

By: WhatLess

WhatLess — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:14:43 +0000

Carthik congratulation on being the second person I don’t know to see my site.

What I find surprising is that if I do a search for “wordlog” I can’t find your site in the first ten pages of results. However there are links that link to your site on the first page. So I think you should see what happens if you drop the dotCom. And give yourself a little bit more unique title like WordPress Wordlog or WordLog. I just think you should make it part of the experiment, see what happens.

By: Chad Brandos

Chad Brandos — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 01:49:45 +0000

My feed reader, SharpReader, shows no duplicate posts. It’s probably all in how the specific program identifies and stores and individual post. Your reader probably relies on the URL, while mine probably uses the timestamp, title, or a combination.

Good luck with the experiment. I’ll give a guess of 6 days to be indexed. Keep up the good wordpress news.

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 01:23:02 +0000

Paul, Google only indexes the blog's main url : google search for excitingness.com. It does not returen results for searches of particular posts , like this one for your finding nemo post. So without permalinks, though your blog url is indexed, none of your posts themselves are.

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 01:17:27 +0000

stef, Carsten, Jesus :
Yes, that is what I am trying to prove — that using WordPress’ Permalinks does lead to better indexing by google. That’s the idea of the experiment.
I have used it succesfully at my blog.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 01:06:42 +0000

I use messy urls for my wordpress site and google indexes them just fine and without prompting.

By: Jesus Vargas

Jesus Vargas — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 01:02:07 +0000

I’m with Carsten. Sincce I bagan with nice URLs, ElTintero has been indexed nicely by Google, and when I had /index.php?p=1, it was indexed, but not as much as with nice urls.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:48:21 +0000

I use .htaccess mod-rewrite rules for the “nice” permalinks, and Google has extensively indexed my site.

By: stef

stef — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:37:14 +0000

My blog wasn’t indexed neither by Google. So I used the ‘rewrite’ module from Apache to create “nice” urls. Two weeks later my site was correctly indexed. So I guess the URLS must not contain “&” and “?” characters.

By: Carthik

Carthik — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:20:26 +0000

I think so too, Geof. One way or the other, it will prove something. The only bias is that the blog with the permalinks is not a fresh one, so it probably has a lead start, but, like the screenshot shows, it’s not in google yet. I hope that is fair enough.

By: Geof

Geof — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:10:08 +0000

I think that this is an extremely worthwhile experiment, Carthik!

By: WhatLess ? » Google experiment

WhatLess ? » Google experiment — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

[...] I find funny and odd, because it found my site. The author (Carthik) is going to try an experiment, to see if it will fix this problem. But I don’t do any [...]