Until a couple of years ago, most blogs and blogging platforms used to display a “Permalink” link on the meta section below each post. Some blogs still do, like Seth Godin’s one, as the picture below illustrates:
I believe this trend emerged from the fact that blogs used to have a standard look, will full posts being displayed on the homepage. As a consequence, some beginner bloggers and webmasters would wrongly link to the homepage expecting to link to one specific post.
To solve this problem, people came with the “Permalink” link. Basically a link that would point to the single and definitive URL of any specific post inside the blog.
Personally, however, I feel that “Permalinks” are obsolete these days, and that bloggers should just get rid of them.
First of all because blogs have evolved a lot over the last couple of years, and we have all sorts of formats around today. Many blogs use only excerpts on the homepage, others use a magazine style and so on. This makes the “Permalink” link less useful and universally recognizable.
Secondly, even back in the day when all blogs displayed full posts on the homepage, those “Permalinks” were pretty much redundant information. That is because the title of each post would also link to the single and definitive URL of that post inside the blog (check Seth’s blog again to see that), so why would we need a second link for that very same function?
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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