ceo

The other day I was on the WP forums and in answering some issues over there, I was steered over to to this post/plugin. Actually it's two separate plugins, but essentially they're doing the same kind of thing - redirecting links to the right place.

If you're using "pretty" permalinks, I strongly advise downloading at least the permalink redirect plugin. Scott explains it rather well, but in essence there's a flaw in the coding of permalinks that basically create two links to the same post (three if you count the old ID method - p=359720398). The plugin takes all of those factors into consideration and 301 redirects every link to the proper permalink. (I've heard that this will be making it into the core at some point.)

The other plugin mentioned in the post is enforce www preference. I used to use htaccess to accomplish this, but now I'm glad of either way because apparently there's a small cookie issue if you use password protected posts and you enter the password at a link not the one your blog URL is. (i.e. if your URL doesn't have a www and you go to the password protected page via the www link, it won't do anything when inputting a password).

Anyhow, thought I'd share this find with the other WPers here. Cheers!

leita

Thanks ceo.

Call it peer pressure, but I recently started using pretty permalinks mainly because it seemed the right thing to do. Thing is, what real difference does it make if my pages are labeled p=XXXX or /2005/09/21/why-i-made-the-switch-to-perm......./ ?

Heh, that sounded like a rhetorical question which wasn't my intent.

Do pretty perms = improved seo? If so, I can understand why those who care would want to make the switch. Otherwise, I'm just too dense to get it. But I do get what you're advising and I thank you.

__________________
http://sparktown.com
pass41

ceo

Yup, using permalinks gives you better search engine whatchacallit - search engines basically avoid any page that appears to be dynamic (blah=3498459), but using rewrite rules / permalinks - negates that side effect and thus much crawling happens.