Cleaner URLs
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Hi all,
I remember in the old days of WordPress there was a Permalinks option where you could choose what your URLs looked like.
It doesn’t seem to be available anymore, and I really want to get the dates out of my URLs – they just make the URLs look messy and they’re not very SEO-friendly, so very surprised WordPress has made them standard (and what looks like mandatory).
Any method of changing this?
Cheers!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I have been answering questions here for over 10 years now. You are remembering wordpress.ORG not wordpress.COM. lol :D
Permalink structure cannot be changed on any site hosted by wordpress.COM. You are confusing wordpress.COM hosted sites and wordpress.ORG software installs on paid hosting.
Please read: Moving to Self-Hosted WordPress https://move.wordpress.comWordPress.COM and WordPress.ORG are completely separate and have different username accounts, logins, features, run different versions of some themes with the same names, and have separate support documentation and separate support forums. Read the differences here http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
If you don’t have a username account at WordPress.ORG account, then click http://wordpress.org/support/ and register one on the top right-hand corner of the page that opens, https://wordpress.org/support/register.php so you can post to the support forums there.
Resetting your WordPress.ORG password http://codex.wordpress.org/Resetting_Your_Password
WordPress.org support docs are at https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
See also https://apps.wordpress.org/support/ -
I really want to get the dates out of my URLs
That’s not possible on any site hosted by wordpress.COM and there is no negative SEO impact.
For shortlinks see https://en.support.wordpress.com/shortlinks/
re: HTML and metadata access
There is no metadata access for us wordpress.COM bloggers and we cannot insert any code into the <header>. This is a multi-user blogging platform. Our blogs share a common architecture. We bloggers cannot access metadata on free hosted WordPress.com blogs. Note http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
What’s important are the keywords in the site title and the tagline:
http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/top-5-site-title-tag-tips/
http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/creating-an-effective-blog-taglineTo draw search engine attention publish unique and engaging content that is completely different from any other published content on the internet.
re: search engine discoverability
All support docs are at https://en.support.wordpress.com/
It can take weeks for search engines to index your site content. Please read this support doc https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/ so you know we have no control over search engines positioning or appearance in the SERPs (search engine page results).To verify blog ownership of a WordPress.com hosted blog with the major search engines you must use this process > http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
Note: Even if you do not verify the blog the content will be indexed by search engines so don’t feel panicky about this please.WordPress.com automatically supplies sitemaps for our blogs to search engines – we do nothing. http://en.support.wordpress.com/sitemaps/#xml-sitemaps-for-search-engines
To gain search engine attention, I recommend that you start publishing posts (not pages) https://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/ frequently. That’s because search engines have little interest in indexing Pages content. Pages are for static content that rarely changes.
WordPress.COM SEO resources that you will want to consult are:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/six-seo-factors-you-should-know/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/ -
Thanks for the info. I’ve worked in SEO for a long time so I’m familiar with all of the above.
Even the blog post on wpbeginner says that we’re not using SEO-friendly URLs http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/seo-friendly-url-structure-for-wordpress/
Which is really annoying because it basically means it’s a A$50 per year for hosting to use WP.org just to change to an SEO-friendly site structure, this should be as standard across all WP.com sites, and I don’t get why standard URLs haven’t been updated yet to remove these, they don’t offer anything.
Generally speaking, shorter URLs and fewer folders between the file and root domain, the better that page is going to be optimised for SEO (there is a lot of info on this online), but now all of my pages are 4 sub-folders deep and away from the root domain, without those folders even being accessible to a user navigating through the site.
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For example, my next “things to do in Sydney” keyword-targeted article is now going to have the URL:
/2017/02/18/things-to-do-in-sydney/
instead of simply and nicely
/things-to-do-in-sydney/
It’s just a shame people are being forced to pay for this simple change.
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