Blogger Custom Permalinks That Help Your SEO

Open any Blogger dashboard that has been running for a few years and you will find URLs like /2019/04/blog-post_17.html or /2021/08/10-things-i-learned-about-my-first.html. The first tells search engines nothing. The second was chopped mid-thought because Blogger shortened the title automatically. Both are permanent unless you take action, and both were avoidable with one setting in the post editor.

Blogger custom permalinks let you choose the last part of every post URL yourself instead of accepting whatever the platform generates. It takes about ten seconds per post. Done before you hit publish, it gives every article a clean, readable address that matches what people search for. Done after publishing, it can break links unless you know the extra step, which I will cover below.

How Blogger Builds a Post URL

Every Blogger post URL has the same structure: your domain, the year, the month, then the permalink, ending in .html. A post published in October 2026 might look like this: yourblog.com/2026/10/custom-permalinks.html. Static pages use a different pattern, /p/page-name.html, with no date.

You cannot remove the year and month from a post URL on Blogger. That part is fixed by the platform. What you control is the final segment, and that segment is where your keyword lives.

What the automatic permalink does

It takes your post title, lowercases it and replaces spaces with hyphens.
It often trims longer titles, cutting them at a word boundary around 40 characters.
It drops punctuation and many short words.
If the title uses non-Latin characters, it falls back to a generic name like blog-post_25.html.

Setting Blogger Custom Permalinks Step by Step

Open the post in the editor before publishing.
In the right-hand Post settings panel, click Permalink.
Switch from Automatic permalink to Custom permalink.
Type your slug in lowercase, using only letters, numbers and hyphens.
Click outside the field to save, then publish as normal.

The field shows a live preview of the final URL. Check it once, because a typo here becomes a permanent part of the address.

What Makes a Good Permalink

A strong permalink is short, uses the main search phrase and drops anything that would date the post or add no meaning.

Post title	Weak permalink	Better permalink
10 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Blogger Template in 2026	10-easy-ways-to-speed-up-your-blogger	speed-up-blogger-template
My Honest Review of Three Free Magazine Themes	my-honest-review-of-three-free-magazine	free-magazine-blogger-themes
How I Fixed the Mobile Menu on My Blog	how-i-fixed-mobile-menu-on-my-blog	fix-blogger-mobile-menu

Three to five words is a good target. Leave out numbers that may change later, like "10 ways" or "2026", so you can update the post without the URL looking stale.

Why Stuffing Keywords Into the URL Backfires

A lot of blogging advice says the URL is a major ranking factor, so cram every keyword into it. I disagree. Search engines give URL words only a small weight, and a slug like best-free-blogger-template-seo-free-blogger-themes-download looks like spam to readers who see it in search results or a shared link.

The real value of a clean permalink is clarity. A person scanning a results page or a forum post can see what the page is about before they click. That improves the click rate, and the click rate matters far more than squeezing a third keyword into the address. Put your effort into the title and the snippet instead. Our guide to writing a meta description that earns the click covers that side.

Changing a Permalink After Publishing

This is where most bloggers get burned. Blogger does not let you edit the permalink of a live post directly. You have to revert the post to draft, change the permalink, then publish again. When you do, the old URL stops working and returns a 404 error. Any backlinks, social shares and search rankings pointing at it are lost.

How to keep the old links working

Copy the old URL path before you change anything, for example /2021/08/10-things-i-learned-about-my-first.html.
Revert to draft, set the new custom permalink, and republish.
Go to Settings, then Errors and redirects, then Custom redirects.
Add a redirect from the old path to the new path, and turn on Permanent so it sends a 301.
Test the old URL in a private browser window.

Republishing can also shift the year and month in the URL if the post date changes. Before republishing, check that the publish date in Post settings still shows the original date.

Permalinks for Blogs Written in Other Languages

If you blog in Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Thai or any language with a non-Latin script, the automatic permalink is close to useless. Blogger cannot turn those titles into readable ASCII, so every post ends up as blog-post, blog-post_12, blog-post_25 and so on. A year later you have a hundred posts that look identical in your analytics and in search results.

The fix is to write a short custom permalink in Latin letters for every post. You have two sensible options:

A transliteration of the main phrase, such as chai-recipe-ghar-par for a Hindi post about making tea at home.
A short English description of the topic, if a good share of your readers search in English as well.

Pick one approach and stay with it across the whole blog, so your URLs read as one consistent system rather than a mix.

Should You Fix Your Old Permalinks?

Not all of them. If an old post gets steady search traffic and has backlinks, its ugly URL is doing its job, and changing it adds risk for little gain. I only fix old permalinks in three cases: the URL is a generic blog-post_ name, it contains a mistake or an outdated year that misleads readers, or the post is being fully rewritten anyway. For everything else, use custom permalinks from today forward and leave the archive alone.

Permalinks also interact with how Blogger handles archive and label URLs. If you have set noindex rules for those, our article on Blogger label pages and noindex explains how they fit together.

FAQ

Can I remove the date from Blogger post URLs?

No. Blogger always includes the year and month in post URLs. If a dateless structure matters a lot to you, publish evergreen content as static pages, though pages do not appear in your feed or label lists.

Do custom permalinks work on a custom domain?

Yes. The permalink is part of the post itself, so it stays the same when you move from blogspot.com to your own domain, as long as the domain is connected through Blogger settings.

Are underscores or capital letters allowed?

Stick to lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. Hyphens are read as word separators, while underscores join words together, and mixed case can create duplicate URLs on some setups.

The Practical Takeaway

Make Custom permalink part of your publishing checklist, right after the title and before the meta description. Keep it to three to five lowercase words that match the main search phrase, avoid dates and numbers, and never change a published URL without adding a permanent redirect. For more on-page settings worth getting right, browse our SEO for bloggers guides.