A couple of days ago I was been strike by an infection, but don’t worry it’s not what your thinkin’. I can say it was an infection that every noobz in wordpress get infected with. It was a day when I decided to have a pretty URL in my website, so what I did was Go to-admin panel-Options-Permalinks change my structures without clear knowledge what ahead of me. And boom!! my website was stock in home page, what ever pages or categories I go I was keep going back to homepage. So immediately I go and search Permalinks infection and it show me the .htaccess that causes all those pain, wtf is that? I got all those viral pain in two days and two nights without complete sleep finding the best remedy and faster maybe. So I decided to recall and look back where it was all started. And this is how it goes…

EXPLANATION:

URL Canonicalization (where I got the infection) - One of the most basic elements of Search Engine Optimization is making your site easy for the search engines to understand. And the strange word Canonicalization is the process of search engines of picking the best url when there was a several choices which is usually refers to home pages. Most people would consider “www.pinoyconsole.com and pinoyconsole.com” are the same url. But technically this two url are nothing but different url. So when search engine canonicalize url they try to pick up that seems like the best representatives. And one of the url will suffer in rankiing or it’s like you put those two url fighting for their own ranking. As we know the more links we get, the more likely you will come up at the top of the search engine result pages. So why divide it with two url? so the solution is next..

Permalink - are the URL’s created for each individual post, In wordpress its an apllication that creates links this way http://www.pinoyconsole.com/?p=54 or something like that. And that pattern is not pretty nor search engine friendly. So to make it a pretty url in the eye of a search engine you need to change the permalink structure, something like this http://www.pinoyconsole.com/category/post.

Many bloggers advice to better identify your post is to use a custom URI, some recommend to put the date and some really don’t really like putting the date which they believe will cause problem in a long run. Here is a couple of structure sample: /index.php/%category%/postname%/. But be careful to use it, better test this first before implementing it. Reason is simple, it will create havoc in your home page and the next one will be your worst enemy.

.HTACCESS - Yes with dot first, a virus well known for recreating itself. I believe .htaccess is the cause of all problems, so to get rid of all the problems is to learn how to hack it.

Here is my advice based on my experience and how I come out of a solution. Take note all problems is unique, no solution are all the same. So better choose what you think is right and will going to work for you. Here’s what I did:

1. I change my Permalink to custom: /index.php/%category%/postname%/

2. Hack my .htaccess something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.pinoyconsole.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.pinoyconsole.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

3. CHMOD .htaccess to 777.

4. Regenerate permalink with the same structures.

5. Then, chmod .htaccess again back to 644 (for your protection)

To learn how I come out with this solution and to know the importance of Canonicalization.

Check the following topics.

1.ww.isaacschlueter.com

2. www.recommendedwebtools.com

3. www.14thc.com

Have fun blogging guys!