Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change — hence called permalink.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blog (or forum) entry after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems, including Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, RapidWeaver, Pivot and Blogger, support such links.

An entry in a blog with many entries is accessible from the site’s front page for only a short time. Visitors who store the URL for a particular entry often find upon their return that the desired content has been replaced by something new. Prominently posting permalinks is a method employed by bloggers to encourage visitors to store a more long-lived URL (the permalink) for reference.

Permalinks frequently consist of a string of characters which represent the date and time of posting, and an identifier which denotes the author who initially authored the item or its subject. Crucially, if an item is changed, renamed, or moved within the internal database, its permalink remains unaltered, as it functions as a magic cookie which references an internal database identifier. If an item is deleted altogether, its permalink can frequently not be reused.

Permalinks have subsequently been exploited for a number of innovations, including link tracing and link trackback in weblogs, and referring to specific weblog entries in RSS or Atom syndication streams.

Blogging software creators and blog hosting websites have not agreed on a standard format for permalink URLs. Some within the blogging community feel that standardization would lead to the practice of meta-information about articles being mined from the URLs themselves rather than an associated RSS stream or meta tags stored within the content.

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