Hello and welcome to your guide to permalinks, I see a lot of questions and some confusion on this subject and so I have decided to give you all some valuable and easy to follow training to ensure you are all fully aware of the importance of permalinks and what they are as well as what they exactly do.

Introduction to permalinks.

The word permalink is a portmanteau word, meaning it is made up of two other words

Portmanteau is a linguistic blend of words like "smoke and fog" forming the word smog

PERMALINK IS CREATED FROM - Permanent and Link =Permalink

So now you know where the word comes from, what I want to empathizes here is the word permanent. They are permanent as in for ever, you can not erase a permalink in the same way you can not really delete a file from your computer

You may think that when you delete a file from your PC it is gone, you could not be more wrong, it is never gone, all delete means is remove the access to the file.

How do your think they catch criminals by taking their hard drives where all the info on them is etched into the disk forever

Your permalinks are forever so once you publish a page or post do not try and change the permalink.

Why are permalinks permanent

Once you click publish your URL or permalink is registered with your DNS (Domain Name System) this in turn updates the whole internet with an IP address of this specific permalink

Think of your DNS as the address book of your website, your website can only be found because your DNS records are continually updated.

If you change the permalink the old one does not go away and now you have a duplicate URL and duplicate content causing a broken link and a 404 page error.

I once heard someone say on WA that google forgets old permalinks, this is nonsense, google is a piece of software, computers can not forget things they are computers not humans

Permalink structures

The permalink structure will determine how each URL on your site is structured, what is important to remember is Google does not see websites it sees only webpages, to Google every page or post on your website is unique that's why its called a URL (Unique Reference Location)

So every page or post is completely unique to google, this is why internal linking is so important for your on page SEO, it gives google a map to your other relevant content, so if you do not have an internal linking strategy then start to adopt one today

Permalink structures Example

I will now show you an example of my own permalink structure so you can see exactly what it looks like

My domain = wpclinik.com

Here is a permalink for one of my product reviews

wpclinik.com/my-completely-honest-wealthy-a...

So the structure is made of my website domain address and the name of the post, this is because I have set my permalink structure up within WordPress to make my URL's structured as I want them.

In the next lesson we are going to learn how to set up your permalink structure within Wordpress.