WordPress URLs

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.

You can choose to change URL structure with so called Custom Options found in your WP admin area. To do this:

1. Login to WP admin area
2. Click Options -> Permaninks

The page title reads: “Customize Permalink Structure“.
Below are listed various URL structures titled “Common Options“.
The last option says “Custom, specify below“.

Here you can define your own “Custom structure“. Some gurus advise to add an .html extension so that the posts appear as regular .html files. This looks like this:

/%postname%.html

The goal here is to achieve high SE ranking. I tried this myself. The result was that SE bots try to get category contents and get 404 error because in this case WP leaves out the trailing slash for categories. So my blog was not indexed intact and my traffic drops down to zero. Here is a line exactly how it appears in my server log:

66.249.66.239 - - [03/Feb/2008:00:23:42 +0200] “GET /category/online-businessfeed HTTP/1.1″ 404 13400 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

Note the missed “/” ? The correct spelling is: /category/online-business/feed

So I decided to go a step back and leave the trailing slash. This looks like this:

/%postname%/

From my observations there is not a significant difference regarding SE rank between http://path/ and http://path/file.html
So now we will see how the things will go. I will post about this soon.

Hope this help.

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