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Once you’ve blogged for awhile you’ll start to cover the same material. No matter how broad your niche, and we recommend narrowing your niche as far as you can without getting too narrow, eventually you’ll start writing about the same topics again. You might even inadvertently come up with duplicate blog post titles for some of those blog posts that cover the same topics. But how will the search engines deal with that?

Well, if the blog post titles are exactly the same then that could pose a problem for the search engines, depending on the structure of your permalink.

WordPress’s default permalink is a funky structure that uses a question mark followed by a string of syllables ending in the culmination of the number of your blog post. It looks like this:

http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/?p=123

That’s no good because you have no keywords in that permalink and keyword-based URLs are better for you in the search engines than a number. The ?p=123 follows your website’s main URL preceded by a forward slash (a / symbol).

WordPress does allow you to change the permalink structure, but it involves several steps and to do it correctly you’ll need access to your server through FTP so that you can alter your .htaccess file. Among the options that you have for changing the permalink in WordPress are:

• Day and Name structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/2008/06/18/sample-post/)
• Month and Name structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/2008/06/sample-post/)
• Numeric structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/archives/123)
• Custom structure

To change the permalink structure for your WordPress blog you’ll need to select the structure that you wish to use and save your changes, but the permalinks of your blog posts won’t be changed right away. In fact, if you click on a blog post then you won’t even be able to see it. You’ll get an error message. That’s because your .htaccess file has to be updated.

Save your changes and copy the code in the box at the bottom of the permalinks page inside of the WordPress admin area. Paste that code into your .htaccess file. If you don’t have one you’ll have to create one. But once you do that then you should be able to see your blog posts. Note that if you have been writing to your blog for any length of time before changing your permalink structure then you will have to 301 redirect all of your previously written blog posts to their new URLs. That will take some time and work so it’s best to change your permalink structure before you start blogging.

To make sure that your blog post titles do not create duplicate content issues for the search engines, choose a permalink structure that allows you to include the date of your newly created posts. That way, if you do have two blog posts with the same exact title, the date of the post will distinguish from each other and you won’t experience any duplicate content issues with the search engines.