SERPs Update: Do custom permalinks work?

Several people have emailed me asking whether the change from the default permalinks to the new custom permalinks will have an effect on the blog’s search engine rankings, Page Rank and ultimately traffic. With over 1,700+ posts, I was a bit worried the results will be tragic. But I held my hopes up.

Only two days after I rebooted this blog with a new theme and change the permalink structure, I’m already seeing the results of the search engines re-indexing my blog. Now, I think I have the answer to this. See results after the jump.

I 301’ed the old links to the new custom permalinks using a WordPress plugin called Permalink Redirect by Scott Young. I also dug into the archives that cross-linked the other posts in the blog as well as other blogs/forums/websites I control that references specific URLS here.

This is what I’m seeing in the SERPs (search engine results page) now for Google:

I was also surprised that the SEs are also showing indented results (when Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it) which I think is good. If you look closely, the same page are ranking in the search results, with the new permalinks taking the first listing followed by the old permalink as an indented result.

Yahoo is also showing the same behavior.

I reckon that the indented listings will disappear once the search engines have fully re-indexed the site and recognized the redirects to the new permalinks. What I failed to completely document thru the course of this migration is the effect in the page rankings. I could not be 100% certain that the new permalinks have contribute to higher search rankings but I think the one for “xbox 360 recall” had a bit of a boost. It used to be in the 5 or 6 a week ago but is now showing at #’s 3 & 4 (indented).

This will pan out in the coming days or weeks and I’ll hopefully see the overall effect in amount of traffic by next month. For the meantime, the blog is enjoying a slight increase in click-thru’s from the search engines because of the double listing.