Before I start my explanation of permalinks, I want to show you two examples so you can refer to them as necessary:
An example of a blog’s main URL (which shows all the posts for a given period of time:
http://www.bloggingbasics101.comAn example of a permalink:
http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/101/2008/11/what-is-a-permalink/
A permalink is the link to an individual blog post. These are important because if you ever need to link to an exact blog entry (e.g., as part of a carnival), you use the permalink as your link. It’s poor blog etiquette not to use the permalink.
If you don’t use the permalink, you’ll just be linking to your main blog page. The problem with that is that, as you post new blog entries, the newest entry appears at the top of your main blog page and the other entries are pushed down on the page. The entry your readers are looking for may be down at the bottom of the page or already in the archives; your reader has no idea where to find the entry! If they click over to your site expecting to see a specific post related to a carnival and they see a different post, they may not take the time to find the “real” post they’re looking for.
You can find the permalink link under any blog entry. However, not all blog hosts/designs handle permalinks the same way.
- Typepad blogs: There’s a link that actually says Permalink under the entry.
- Blogger: The link varies. It’s usually the time stamp of the post or the actual post title.
- Other blogs have other links; many times the permalink is the title of a given post.
One way to figure out which link is the permalink of a post (if it’s not obvious) is to put your curser over each link under or above a post. As you hover over a link a little box should come up that says permalink. If it doesn’t, that link probably isn’t your permalink and you should move on to the next link.
Once you find the permalink, click on it and you’ll be taken to a page with just that blog entry on it. Snazzy, huh? Now, to link to that page you just need to copy the URL in the address bar and use it where ever you were inserting your link (e.g., a Mr. Linky or a blog contest).
This post has be updated. It was originally posted on June 20, 2007.
thanks for the information mate..
i was searhing for what a permalink actually is and got a great answer from your website..
thanks for guiding me towards the right path..
I have clients that are very new with blogging and this has been a big help, I’ll be forwarding this site to them.
Thanks for clearifying the buzz word in weblogs. I’ve been stuck to this word many a times. Now its clear now.
Thanks for this nice article. I also used a CMS site and wanted to know more about permalinks.
Thanks again
I am so new to this link system. How many back links is considered good for your site. I have noticed that blogger doesn’t let you post back links in the href format.
Also is having links posted to thousands similarblogs
E.g. wordpress. is that considered negative?
Whoa! I’m very digging the structure on this site http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/2008/11/what-is-a-permalink. It’s simple, but still efficient. Very often it can be very difficult to obtain that balance between usability and appearance. I must say you have done a fantastic job on this. Also, your blog website loads super fast for me at Firefox. Excellent Blog!
Thanks for the explanation about permalinks.
Thanks for the explanation on permalinks. Until now, I had never used them but from now will ALWAYS use them. Many thanks!
Thank you for the good discussion of permalinks!
Thanks for the explanation. I was confused about this even though I seem to see permalinks all over the place. Thanks again.
Thanks for the explanation once again, just in case my other entry didn’t post.
Great info, thanks. I am now going to (try) to put it to work as I learn to use pinterest to pin my own blog posts.
Thanks for this posting Melanie, very useful. Now, an additional point you may be able to help with is does writing “permalink” in a link make a difference to the search engines? I saw a blog posting once that actually mentioned “permalink:blogpostingpage.php”
Thanks,
ake
Ake,
Having the word “permalink” in your actual permalink will only help you if you’re trying to rank in search engine placement for that word. If that’s not your intent, then there’s no reason to include it. However, it IS important to have “pretty permalinks.” Pretty permalinks look like the one I mention in the article (e.g., http://bloggingbasics101.com/2008/11/what-is-a-permalink) and include the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Sometimes a blog platform (WordPress included) defaults to permalinks that look like this: http://bloggingbasics101.com/p?308 (or something similar). See the difference? The latter example doesn’t have anything for search engines to use to index your article as relevant to search terms. The former example that uses the article title as the permalink includes the keywords I used in the article title. Now when search spiders crawl my site, they can use my permalink to recognize that this article is relevant to searches about my included keywords.
Hope that helps!
Melanie