- Image via Wikipedia
and yes, I know it irritates Matt when I spell it with a lowercase P but I can’t be bothered to do funky capitalization for other people, just myself. So, anyway.
There appears to be a problem with reblogging on WordPress.com; an SEO problem. Normally WP.com (there, happy Matt?) has excellent SEO, and reblogging that is built into a platform would normally increase that, by driving more and more links to blogs within the platform. Well, that’s good for the platform and, as long as the links go to the “official” permalink, that’s good for the individual blogs as well.
That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case at WordPress.com. Take a look at this reblog of a post here.
Original URL:
https://raincoastermedia.com/2010/09/10/seo-secrets-for-wordpress-com/
reblogged to:
http://chimac.net/2010/09/11/seo-secrets-for-wordpress-com-via-raincoaster-media/
Both these blogs have domain mapping, but that shouldn’t matter. Now, if you look at the Chimac post, you’ll see at the bottom there are two links to my blog: one says Read More and the other says “via raincoaster media“. That link?
https://raincoastermedia.com/?p=1717
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a problem. Incongruent permalinks annoy search engines no end; it may even be that to Google, these look like duplicate posts instead of the same one, and that will kill your Googlejuice stone dead.
There are some possibilities that I need to investigate further, since the “ugly permalink” (which contains, you will notice, no keywords and thus is not SEO-optimized) is not something I’m familiar with, having always followed the very good advice to use the pretty, keyword-rich permalinks on my external blogs.
- The “Ugly Permalink” could add googlejuice to WordPress.com itself but not the individual post which has been reblogged. That would be ugly indeed, since the Pretty Permalink would give it to both and there’d be no ethical reason to use one which penalizes bloggers.
- The “Ugly Permalink” could somehow be more inclined to display advertising, again accruing more of a benefit to WP.com than to the individual blogger who, unless she’s got the Ad Control upgrade, gets no advertising revenue and unwittingly risks pissing off her readers with more ads than you can shake a mouse at.
- The “Ugly Permalink” could be just a technical glitch, possibly because the wp.me shortlink goes to the “ugly” version. It appears the original reblogger got the link from twitter, so that would account for it.
I will have to log out, do the cookie dance, and investigate. In the meantime, feel free to chime in with your thoughts.
UPDATE: Here’s the word I got from staff via email:
The reblog tool uses the link with the post id ?p=1717 because it will always work in the future even if the author changes the post slug. This is the intended behavior.
This does not take me to my happy place, but there’s fuck all I can do about it, of course. I’d rather have the full SEO power of the pretty permalink and the occasional 404 if I change a link, because everybody knows that changing permalinks is a mug’s game, and it is my view that the web should not be optimized for mugs.
raincoaster media 
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
Oh, right, I forgot the vanity plugin they have at WP.com that always capitalizes the P anyway. Silly people; they should install it in the forum too!
GregEh
September 11, 2010
Knowing that it bothers Matt will only make me lowercase WordPress more :]
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
Oh it does. Didn’t you see his Northern Voice keynote? It was the first thing he did: beg everyone to uppercase the P.
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
Well, the shortlink to this post http://wp.me/p47DL-rN resolves immediately to the pretty permalink. More tinkering and testing to do…
Jennifer
September 11, 2010
Just noticed that all the links from the new Subscription homepage are ugly permalinks as well.
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
Oh dear. I know staff is tinkering, but that is old technology that was abandoned for good reason. I know, too, that the pretty links are built from that, but NOT building them is a terrible thing. Oh, I hope they are only doing this temporarily.
When you click the Twitter button on the post, it doesn’t use wp.me any more. It uses something else, see here:
Jennifer
September 11, 2010
You used the official “Tweet Me” button from Twitter to post it. I believe that’s why. When you publicize a post after publishing, it uses the wp shortlink.
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
Nooooo, I used the little button that WP built into the post, the Share button. And I vaguely recall noticing when it first went in that it used wp.me instead. I thought that was slick, and it doesnt’ matter in SEO terms as Twitter links are NoFollow.
Jennifer
September 11, 2010
That little button IS the official “Tweet Me” button, and, yes, they probably changed the link shortener when the official Twitter button went live. :) http://wp.me/pf2B5-1hx http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/pushing-our-tweet-button.html
(but we’re getting a bit OT here. I’d still run your original musings by Staff.)
raincoaster
September 11, 2010
The previous post was on Freshly Pressed for the briefest of seconds. I imagine they’ll hear about this soon enough; I sent an email or two as well.
Yes, it did originally use wp.me but it doesn’t now. Also, two days ago the buttons disappeared off the front page of the blog, to be visible behind the clickthrough like comments, and then I screamed bloody murder in the Share forum thread as is my wont and Poof, back on the front page. Probably not cause and effect, but I’m taking credit anyway.
Which just shows staff is still tinkering with this. Sometimes I get the feeling Matt puts them all in a bomb proof concrete bunker in case something goes REALLY wrong and the hordes come for them with pitchforks and sharp, sharp Club Penguin tridents.
sunburntkamel
September 12, 2010
as long as the link hits a 301 (redirect to the correct, canonical URL), the link juice should be decent. a proper permalink would be better, sure.
raincoaster
September 12, 2010
Thanks for weighing in on this. I noticed a weirdness with the feed on raincoaster.com starting in May, and May was when they did some changes to the permalink structure around Wp.com. My hits have gone from an average of about 2500 a day to less than a thousand in the span of four months. I have NO subscribers on that blog, which is odd considering the number I had before.
I’ve been in touch with staff for literally weeks trying to figure out why. If the permalinks of my old posts are suddenly changed, yep, that’ll do it. Lots of those posts were on the front page of Google for significant searches. New URL= starting from zero, no?
timethief
September 16, 2010
@raincoaster
I’ve been following this ie. lurking because I really need to keep my blood pressure down. I too have two blogs being domain mapped. I have meticulously avoided ever breaking any URLs myself and now there’s this. Another complication in addition to the fact that Richard’s experiment with reblogging my post and then reblogging the reblog demonstrated that the reblogged reblog does not link back to the original blogger’s post. Now we have this URL muck-up to contend with.
New URL= starting from zero, no?
***head desk***
raincoaster
September 16, 2010
Yep, it’ll accrue SOME juice to the blog, but not nearly as much as if it linked to the Pretty Permalink. And it does raise the scary specter of duplication penalty; that’s what really worries me, to be frank.
I think it’s worth emailing google about.
Richard
September 17, 2010
I doubt wp (sorry Matt) would do something like this on purpose, if the permalinks and/or duplicate content from reblogs are the issue. The thing is, there definitely appears to be an issue, and we have raincoaster’s blog as a good example. It has been around for a good bit of time, has a good history of traffic and search engine referrals, and now it is getting less than half the hits it had been.
Something is rotten somewhere.
Gaurav Tiwari
August 24, 2011
I regularly read many reblogged posts of Freshly Pressed posts. If one (?) says that this feature is only for WordPress.com blogs, then (s)he’s absolutely wrong. What if the reblogger moves his blog to another blogging platform? Will WP remove that specific reblogged-post? If yes! Then how? And If no! Then why did they not make it universal …I mean.. for any sp(b)logger? Annoying.
[Good Post Raincoaster.] I liked it but not going to reblog. ;)
bernhard1965
January 11, 2022
Reblogged this on Der Amateur Photograph and commented:
test
raincoaster
January 11, 2022
What are you testing?
bernhard1965
January 11, 2022
If reblogging works. Result, it doesn’t work 😒