Make Permalinks Permanent

Two colleagues of ours (Gary Price and Genie Tyburski) have the good fortune to have their content indexed by AltaVista News. Nobody is more thrilled for them as I am. They both put out good content which deserve to be indexed by this great news engine.

Both Genie and Gary use permalinks for their respective publications. Genie's links never change, mostly due to her impressive URL structure. Gary's permalinks change on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis. The reason is simple. He wants the most important content on top despite the chronology in which he posts. Meaning, if he posts an important story in the morning and wants it to stay on the top of his blog, he republishes the old content every time he updates his blog with new content, thus giving the old content a new permalink (which is why those who subscribe to his RSS Feed will sometimes be bombarded with the same content over and over - putting a twist on yesterdays discussion on redundant information - to the disappointment of some readers.)

Back to Altavista news. Since Altavista news probably indexes Gary's blog more than once a day (maybe every hour), it picks up on all the old permalinks and a funkiness eludes from a search. This evening when my aggregator brought back my hourly Altavista news searches, Gary's titles and summary content was all screwy {screenshot} - the titles didn't match the content. This is probably because of the constant changes in his permalinks.

I am not one to tell Gary how to run his weblog (goodness knows I hate it when people tell me how to run mine), but he may want to take this issue into account when changing permalinks.