Permalink format adjustments

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I may start making adjustments to the format of “permalink” entries on my site.

Here is an example permalink:

http://www.matthom.com/archive/2007/03/29/google-notebook-enhancements

This format has been in place since July 2005, when I made further enhancements.

There’s a couple of things that bother me about this format:

  • The needless use of the word “archive.”
  • The “post slug,” (ie: google-notebook-enhancements) becomes too long for some titles that are a bit more “wordy.”

Here’s what I intend to do:

  1. Remove the word “archive” from the URL.
  2. Shorten the “post slug” to only a few words, even if the title is much longer than that. There are certain “catch words,” such as “and,” “if,” “the,” etc – that don’t need to be in the URL.

My question is how does Google handle this change? It think my entire database of entries will have to be re-indexed to point to the new URI. Will I suffer a drop in search engine rankings?

5 thoughts on “Permalink format adjustments”

  1. I used to have the superfluous “/blog/” as part of my permalink.

    When you set up permanent redirects, Google’s re-indexing will be seamless. Once you’ve made the necessary changes in your blog software, the .htaccess rule is deceptively simple:
    redirect 301 /archive/ http://matthom.com/

    This is a blanket 301 for every URL under the /archive/ directory.

    It get much more complicated if you’re thinking about editing the post “slug”, a.k.a. which words to leave out of the title.

  2. Thanks Matt. That .htaccess rule should work great.

    It get much more complicated if you’re thinking about editing the post “slug”, a.k.a. which words to leave out of the title.

    You’re right. I think I’ll stay away from that then.

  3. It looks to me like that rule above would redirect everything to the homepage. wouldn’t that totally screw you on any existing incoming links. Nothing would end up where you wanted it to. A rule like this would maintain the rest of the URL.

    RewriteRule ^archive/?(.*)?/?$ /$1 [R=301,L,QSA]

    As for shortening your slugs. URLS of over 100 total characters are bad for some search engines. I would recommend retaining the existing slugs in a separate column in the entries table. Shorten the slugs you want to shorten. Then in your 404 page add a block that checks to see if the slug requested that triggered a 404 exists in the retained column if so, give them a redirect, if not give them the 404. I have used this trick on several sites we have redesigned at work to help maintain proper content access.

  5. Tim~
    It may seem like my rule above would redirect everything to the homepage, but it doesn’t. In fact, I’m employing a similar rule on my site right now:
    redirect 301 /blog/ http://mattbrundage.com/
    It works like a wildcard in that only part of the URL is redirected. Everything after “/blog/” remains. The rest of the URL is maintained without a specific RewriteRule.

    FYI, I’m on Apache 1.3.34 on Unix.

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