As Wordpress user, did you ever pay attention to that «Post Slug» box in the sidebar of the new/edit post page? It’s there for a good reason. If you are using the cute permalinks that use the post title as part of the URL, chances are you are letting it pick sometimes more keywords than Google will be really happy about. An interview with the Google guy Matt Cutts makes it clear: if your permalink is too wordy, it will start to look not very specific and, therefore, each keyword in it will hold less than nominal weight for search results. That’s why you edit the post slug before letting it go on air.
See this same post. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the title, it uses only four meaningful words. But, if I was using the category as a keyword in the post permalink, the word Wordpress would appear duplicated. That would start to look dangerously spammy.
It’s not just that. Even if I’m talking about how this issue is fixed for Wordpress, the post content is useful for anyone using «google-friendly permalinks» as a query. They may figure how to use this knowledge for their own Content Management System. So, even though I am a nice fellow that blogs for the experience and not to pay bills, I should think this post can help more people if the word Wordpress is removed from the url. After all, it’s already in the page title, the post header, and several times in the body text. If Mr. Google —that octopus dude we know they hide in a box classifying the Internet all day long— really thinks it’s an important keyword, he’s not really going to miss it.
But, in my opinion, the real issue is the failure of purpose. Did you ever hear this style of permalinks described as «pretty»? Well, when they clutter the URL box, look noisy and, for raw URL links, become div width hostile, they aren’t pretty no more. That’s the third and most important reason to edit it. There’s nice but lazy people out there. They may copy your permalink, paste it and go, and since they are referring you, you don’t want to make their blogs and forums look ugly.
