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Change your permalink structure and keep the old one too

After researching a bit i made up my mind to change the permalinks structure on my Electronics Blog. I ran the blog for about 8 months with the default permalinks structure which is /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ . The reason i wanted to change the permalinks structure is pure SEO. I noticed that many other blogs are using only the /%postname%/ as permalinks structure, so i figured they must know why, and as a plus it also looks nicer, i don’t really like long URLs, they are better shorter.

But as i was thinking at making the change a problem appeared in my mind: Google has all my pages indexed with the old permalinks structure which means when someone will try to access a result page from Google they will get a “not found” page on my blog, not to mention the loss of all my back-links on the articles, this will be like killing my blog, if I’d do this my traffic will go down with about 80 %. Not a good idea indeed.

So i did a little research on Google about permalinks migration, and i found a great plugin, The Permalinks Migration Plugin. The plugin makes use of a directive named the “301 Redirect”. This redirect is acknowledged by all the search engines including Google, and what it does, is to redirect search engines and any user trying to access the old structure link to the new structure. And you wont loose a visitor, not even one.

You can download The Permalinks Migration Plugin from here. After unzipping you upload the files to your WordPress plugins directory and then you activate the plugin trough the admin panel. After you activated the plugin you need to go to Options > PermalinksMigration : and set your old permalinks structure or it should be already set. Next you have to go to Options > Permalinks and make the change to your new desired permalinks structure, i recommend the /%postname%/ as structure or /%category%/%postname%/ , apply the new settings and its done, your post will now show with the new permalinks, but every old link will be redirected to the new one. Isn’t this great ?

After seeing how easy it was to change the permalinks structure i also did it here, on this blog.

Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.