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Permalink: What is it good for?

I can see how it was important to have permalinks during the infant blogging days.
In its maturity it seems like a useless perk.

Looking at Popular blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo, TUAW, their permalink is the same as the post title link. Essentially it takes u to the same place. i.e., the comments page, with the complete article. thats what 99% of the blogs do.

For blogs like Boing Boing, which do not allow comments and have no post title links, have a need for permalink.

So conclusion, If u already have a page where ur users can see the whole post (namely post title links) then no need for permalinks. they are useless in that case.
If you do not have a dedicated page then make one and assign it to the post title and have no use for permalinks either.

Personally I dunno why boing boing doesn't have post title links. Sounds stupid to me. Its natural usage, click on the title to read the whole story. Form news sites to blogs all over have that same way of working, and boing boing takes it away.

Comments

  • Ugh, I hate permalinks. They were made for short blog posts that fit entirely on the front page. When someone wanted to link to that article, they used to link to the front page, which wouldn't contain the post several blog posts later. So permalink was invented to give a place to link to.

    Permalink. Now that is an interesting concept. Lets redefine the user's expectation of links. All links are un-Permalink, except for this one which we have labeled to specifically be a permalink. Despite the name, the lifetime of many blogs still lends these 'permanant links' to linkrot.

    As for the term itself: Permalink. Its jargon. Its too wordy. It rolls off the tongue like an anvil. It mocks those who don't know what it means. It makes it appear OK to break the convention of naming your links meaningfully. It breaks the usability mantra not to link a page to itself. In many implementations, Wordpress among them, the title of the post is not clickable, yet both the permalink and comments link at the bottom are. Do they describe the article? I believe not.

    I am all for the word fading away like a bad dream.
  • SEO

    If you can reduce the number of URLs that renders your content, or provide Google and other search engines with a permalink to hint to them that there is a single piece of content, then you are not penalised for appearing to have duplicate content on your site. In theory.

    Which is why I like the idea of removing this type of URL:
    http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/6241/permalink-what-is-it-good-for/
    When page spanning will additionally create this URL:
    http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/6241/1/permalink-what-is-it-good-for/

    Both those pages are identical. Content should ideally appear once on a domain, at one location. It shouldn't be possible to reach the same page through different URLs (appearing to have duplicate content), and for that reason permalinks are good as they are nice ways of hinting to search engines where the unique URL for a piece of content is.

    The real problem the SEO community has is that no-one really knows how Google judge your site. Well, not all of the parameters. But it is known that you can be penalised for appearing to have a site full duplicated content.
  • ok, here's one good reason for permalinks. printing. you have an article. you wouldn't want to print out either only the teaser or the article with the whole bunch of comments to it
    reason no2. imagine you want to send this article to someone. same story.
    finally, you just want to save it somewhere separately. and happens to be an item from someone else's blog which you just visited.
    :)
  • @alast. for ur first point. it should then be called Print this page. Since Permalinks on all popular blogs take u to the same comments page, and provide no print specific page. News sites however do provide a print this page link. that is essential for multiple page stories.

    #2, if u wnat to send the same article to someone then send the post link. why permalink?
    #Finally, So u want to just save the post itself, and want nothing else in it. Permalink of popular blogs don't do that either.

    Lets face it. Permalink don't do any of the things people actually expect it to do.
  • edited April 2007
    well, people's expectations do change.

    but there's also aother thing. in a forum - unlike a blog - i'd like my comments pages to look different from the articles ones. for obvious reasons. on comments pages i don't want to be distracted by huge blocks of texts, on articles pages - by user-icons and such like.

    it's an aesthetic experience as well, not merely a technocratic one. or at least it should be :)
  • in wordpress if u hover over the Post link the title popup says "Permalink to ......"
    and below they have Permalink link that says the exact same thing and points to the exact same page.

    Have been gone stupid or what.
  • Sorry to dig this up but I'm semi curious myself...surely the whole point of a permalink is to provide a link to an article that will work regardless of whether the article is moved etc? e.g. if someone permalinks this comment, even if the comment was moved to a different thread, the permalink would still work regardless...
  • Permalinks are good for internal usage to a degree for large boards like this. I don't think they're really intended to be SEO friendly but rather link people already within the forum to topics or replies of interest since you can quickly just copy the link as you see it on a per-post basis. It's just easier to link someone than say link them to the thread and say "oh, it's the 453rd post..." which in a large discussion with odd number paginated queries lets just say math is not on everyones side. The only problem I've noticed with permalinks on Vanilla is when whispers are introduced into the discussion and someone links you to a post ono say, page 20 when whispers occur on all the pages extending the content for those who've sent and received whispers in a thread. Chances are it's going to fall before or well after the actual page. That's the only bug I've located so far against warranting the usefulness of permalinks :\
  • The new permalinks (the Comment Links extension) doesn't have the wrong page/lots of whispers problem. It goes straight to the right comment, no matter on which page it is.
  • Ahh, it must then be an issue with the other comments_permalinks add-on which gets it wrong, it's output seems a bit lighter though.
  • edited May 2007
    I'm quite proud of that accomplishment. :-)

    Not so proud of the clipboard menu, (you can disable it) but hey—I'm learning.
  • Ahh yes, that is WallPhones extension :) that's the only bug I have to report for it WP...
  • dan39dan39 New
    edited June 2010
    From an SEO point of view, it makes more sense if the Permalink has a more appropriate link-text context than the word "Permalink" repeated a dozen times on the same page. Most forums and blog comment threads will simply link the date as the comment's permalink... like this:



    Why not just simplify the permalinks and comment date into one simple link? It's a very common convention — I believe this is how WordPress handles permalinks within the comments. It makes the layout cleaner and give the permalinks better SEO context.
  • I fully agree with @dan39; also, this is common practise.
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