Despite this fact, Google's Blogger users have absolutely no control on the filename of their blog posts. Blogger automatically derives the name from the title of the post - it just concatenates the first six words of the title separating each word with a hypen and also removes the common words like A or The.
For instance, if I create a new post titled "Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1", Blogger will store the file as yahoo-desktop-search-getting-closer-to.html. Notice that it even removed the exclaimation mark in the permalink.
Basic SEO understanding suggest that in the above case, the file name should contain keywords like "Yahoo", "Desktop Search", "X1" since the post is all about "Desktop Search" provided by Yahoo! and X1.
Since Blogger doesn't allow custom file names, here is a simple blogger hack:
1. Compose your Blogger article with a title containing all the keywords (6 is the limit) and in the right order (e.g. X1 Yahoo Desktop Search)
2. Publish your post on Blogger.
3. Now open the post in w.bloggar, an offline blog editing tool and change the page title to something more meaningful (e.g. Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1)
4. Click "Post & Publish". Congratulations! Your permalink filename is what you want it to be and no longer defined by Blogger.
There's another scenario - Say if you wrote a post on Monkeys an year ago and that article became very popular with lot of people linking to it. One day, you decide to add about Bananas in that same article so a page title "Monkeys and Bananas" makes more sense. But if you change the page title, Blogger will change your page URL or permalink - That would not be a good thing as people who have previously linked to that Monkeys page would no longer find it and there's little guarantee that search engines will index the new page. The above hack may save you here as well.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/07/blogger-hack-for-better-google.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
heya amit this wbloggar software is really helpful for posting with ease. can we upload general music or mp3 or any other software files using this
and can we change the entire template of the blog using this(if so how)
Written on 27/5/06 11:55 PM
This is possibly one of the most important Blogger hacks there is, but I'm having problems with wbloggar when I have several blogs under one Blogger account id...
Looking around, I found the same functionality using "Blogger for Word" - ie. you can change the Post Title without altering the URL of an existing post. It also works with multiple blogs under one Blogger account.
Quicklode
Written on 1/9/06 9:51 PM
Hi Amit,
Please verify whether your translation is working fine or not. The difficulty i faced was that I translated the page of yours into French (using one of those flag-icons) and couldn't revert to English without going a page back. When in french or any other language for that matter the description displayed by the flag does is not correct.
this is a good blog and I care for its correctness.
Regards,
Prashant.
Written on 23/10/06 5:15 PM
Your blog is one of my favourites.Keep it up.Nice contribution.
Written on 21/8/07 8:41 PM
Granted you've posted this 2 years back it seems as though blogger allows this with a simple rewrite of the title, as the original title remains as the url. Still excellant advice either way.
Written on 15/9/07 4:47 PM