Money Makers
How to Change or Redirect Wordpress Permalinks Safely
There are times when you decide to change your link structure for the sake of SEO optimization or you simply need a change. For example:
Old permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/01/10/your-post-title/ (too long, irrelevant)
New permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/your-post-title/ (short, highly relevant)
However, changing your link structure is going to affect your site traffic as the old links are already indexed by search engines and bookmarked or linked by your readers. You can’t afford to bear the loss as the links were built up over times. The only solution to the problem is redirect them permanently to new links, which is known as 301 Redirect or Permanent Redirect. There are many ways to perform the redirection, however, Deanlee creates a wordpress plugin that makes permalinks redirection a breeze.
It is said that by performing the permalinks redirection, search engines will update their indexes quickly and your pagerank will be passed on to the new links too.
How to do it:
- Download the Permalinks Migration Plugin
- Upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
- Activate the plugin from your admin dashboard
- Go to Settings > PermalinksMigration. Update your old link structure in the field
- Go to Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Custom Structure. Update your new link structure (for eg. /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/Â )
- Go to any of your old posts and test if the redirection works correctly. Or simply go to Google, and enter site:yourdomain.com, select one of your posts with old permalinks and you should be redirected to the exact same post with NEW working permalinks.
- DONE!
Little drawback:
The plugin works perfectly redirecting the old post permalinks to the new ones, however, it doesn’t redirect comment permalinks, for eg:
Comment permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/01/10/your-post-title/comment-page-1/
I’m looking forward to Deanlee to come up with a fix to this, and if you can live with this little imperfection, go ahead and use the plugin, it’s by far the best wordpress permalinks redirection plugin.
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2 Responses to “How to Change or Redirect Wordpress Permalinks Safely”
This Blog reminds me the reason I like bloging so much, the interaction is very important with readers and you guys have it right. Looks great too, will be back for more posts, David the mover.
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Just a tip, even if your permalinks are longer, it shouldn’t really affect SEO. Keep in mind that search engines are smarter nowadays and the longer link structure shouldn’t be a problem.
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