Do not forget http:// in WordPress posts

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More often than not, most people type website/blog addresses without http or www. Nowadays, this is not much of a problem, as most sites have 301 redirects from non-www version to www version.

Whenever I have linked out to other blogs, I have used the URL from the address-bar. This avoids any typo in the URL. However, when I linked to the official Orkut blog on this post, I forgot to add http://.

And WordPress made me pay dearly. Apparently, WordPress adds the host domain(which, in this case is techzilo.com/) before the URL, meaning a useless jumbo like http://techzilo.com/en.blog.orkut.com.

This creates an unreachable link, which adds to the frustration of the readers. Some time back, I had a barrage of comments about the unreachable download URL, because of the above-mentioned error.

However, this is not just about reader frustration - the broken link can have serious implications on your search rankings. Your PR may (and probably will) be the first to suffer.

August 2nd, 2007 Leave a comment

7 Comments

  1. CristianR said on August 3rd, 2007

    I’ve also noticed this and actually experienced this error a few times . It’s worth to pay attention to it and never let it happen again :)

  2. Ashwini said on August 3rd, 2007

    Actually my site too suffered from this kinda problem
    My SERP rating decreased significantly
    But with Google Webmaster tools, I corrected it
    and a much more traffic from Google

    I’m not sure whether this will have an impact on PR

  3. Post authorSumesh said on August 3rd, 2007

    @Ashwini: It will have big problems on PR- you see, PR decreases when you link out to unreachable URLs(which is what happens in this case).

  4. More Great Reader Blog Tips said on August 5th, 2007

    [...] Do not forget http:// in WordPress posts by Sumesh [...]

  5. redwall_hp said on August 5th, 2007

    This is a general “feature” of HTML in general. Back in the days when I hand-coded *everything* (including articles) I occasionally forgot the http and it wouldn’t work. Nowadays I use Wordpress (though I still hand-code my templates).

    What happens when you leave-out the http is the server tries to find a directory called whatever .com.

  6. Post authorSumesh said on August 5th, 2007

    Thanks for the info.

    We need experts like you to give additional insights ;)

  7. Nirmal said on August 7th, 2007

    I too have experienced this problem before, i corrected it.

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