I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

Another reason is that someone sent me an e-mail recently asking me if I’m such an expert, then why aren’t my own URL’s optimized for best performance?”

Well that person had a good point, and my answer was that I didn’t know any better when I first set it up, and I’ve just been too busy/lazy to change them, and afraid of even the temporary ranking drops that go along with changing URLs.

As more and more users look at the URLs in their browser status bar before they click, having keywords in your URLs is going to improve click-throughs.

For example, a while ago I wrote a blog post called “Things to hate about office 2007” and I needed to send someone a link to it.

When I pasted the URL I saw this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/462 and that’s just not very compelling or informative. However, once I changed my permalinks, it looked like this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/microsoft/things-to-hate-about-office-2007/

“Are you crazy?” you might be asking yourself… “Doesn’t changing your URL’s or permalinks create 404 errors?”

Well yes it does, but not if you do 301 redirects.

“Are you even more crazy?” you might be thinking… “Isn’t doing hundreds or thousands of 301 redirects a complete pain in the neck?”

Well, yes it HAS been in the past, but there’s a cool WordPress plugin called Deans Permalinks Migration that made the process so easy it’s hard to believe.

With 301 redirects in place for all of my old URL’s, there’s really no risk of permanently losing search visibility, since all of my indexed URLs will still work, all of my inbound links will still work, and finally, the visible Google PageRank should flow to the new pages I’ve created with the next update.

The downside is of course that all the pages will show as a PR0 until at least the next update, and possibly two, but since we can’t sell links anymore, who really cares?

The other downside is that traffic and rankings will likely drop, but only temporarily. Exactly WHY this happens is in my opinion, on of Google’s shortcomings, but it does. Show me a domain that changes URL’s, but loses no rankings temporarily, and Ill call it a fluke. Things always drop.

That said, with a properly implemented 301 strategy, ALL of your rankings should (and will) return just as strong as ever, provided you don’t have other radical changes that would negatively affect visibility.

Check out the plug-in, and if you want to see how easy it is to use, I’ve added a 3 minute video –

You’re not alone…
Users all over the country are finding out daily that suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, they are unable to send mail if they want people to reply to their business or personal e-mail addressed other than one that is @comcast.net. This is because Comcast is blocking port 25 , which is your default port for sending email through your mail software.

The error message says (fill in your own X):
The connection to the server has failed. Account: ‘XXXX’, Server: ‘xxx.xxx.xxx.xx’, Protocol: SMTP, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Socket Error: 10060, Error Number: 0x800CCC0E

Gee that’s helpful, isn’t it?
If you are using mail.yourdomain.com for your SMTP outgoing mail server, then you get an error saying “unable to connect to the mail server” even though it just successfully connected to the mail server to retrieve your incoming mail. After wasting time calling your web host, and going through various troubleshooting techniques, they tell you to call Comcast.

To make matters worse, users are finding out one at a time, because Comcast is slowly rolling out these changes user by user in individual markets around the country. This month, it’s apparently Portland Oregon’s turn, where I live.

To cut to the chase, here’s the solution:
Change the port your computer is using for SMTP outgoing mail, from Port 25 to one that your hosting provider will allow. In most cases, this seems to be port 587 for Portland providers.

To do this in Outlook -

• Go to tools – e-mail accounts – view or change existing account
• Sselect the appropriate mail account and hit the change button
• Go to the more settings button, and into the Advanced tab
• Change your default port 25, to port 587, and you should be back in business in most cases.

Still broken?

• Added note from comments below – Some people in the midwest for whom 487 didn’t work succesfully chaged to 465 and picked SSL under the “use the following type of encrypted connection” drop down. They did not check the “this server requires an encrypted connection” box.

In Outlook express -

• Go to tools – accounts – Mail tab
• Choose Properties box – Advanced Tab – and from there you can do the same

The reason Comcast claims to be doing this is in an effort to prevent spam being sent by zombie/spyware/virus laden computers using their bandwidth and their Internet connection.

I suspect they are really doing it to limit liability for any future potential lawsuits, and not really to save bandwidth, but I have no problem with that.

The problem with Comcast doing this is that they do not seem to be telling all of their support people, and do not be notifying their customers. This has been going on around the country for MONTHS.

Instead, it takes the end user hours of frustrating time on the phone spent with lower-level tech-support who have no idea that this change has even taken place.

One can only guess how many individual users are still frustrated at this very moment because they are being forced to do their business e-mail from home using their @comcast.net accounts, after uninformed Comcast agents are able to help them?

As a web host, we were forced to spend hours dealing with Comcast before we got an actual answer, and we still lost a couple of hosting customers over it, who were convinced that it must be our fault, since Comcast told them it was.

Great customer service. If there was any competing product in my market I would switch in a heartbeat. I tried once before in 2005 after nearly an entire summer of poor Comcast connectivity.

Thanks Comcast, for valuing our time so very little, in your quest to make mega millions.