No one wants to just write article on articles and no one is paying attention to him. Good traffic with comments encourages and we feel more enthusiasm in our work. Without search engine optimization, getting more and more traffic is worlds’ toughest job. Concentrate on the source of traffic you are getting. Few people are very good in website marketing and social networking and they get referred traffic. Read our article on traffic analysis for more in-depth view so that you can concentrate on your weak area. Hence it is clear that we can’t live in blogging world without SEO. If your site is properly optimized for search engine you will be getting traffic from search engine.
In the start of my blogging career I was using the permalink structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ for many reason. One reason was to avoid duplicated content in shape of similar post title. Read our post for Permalink Structure Selection.
Then I have decided to change the permalink structure to /%postname%/. But here I faced a problem that if I change the permalink of my site I will lose all my traffic coming from search engine and my site will have broken links. So how to change permalink structure without losing the traffic from search engine?
We have a solution in shape of plugin from Dean Lee. All you need to download and install the plugin.
After installing the plugin go to Setting–>Permalinks Migration
Here you will see the current permalink structure, which may look like;
Do not change any setting; just go to your permalink setting and set /%post%/ as your permalink. Save your setting and enjoy 301 Permanent Redirection.
Mechanism behind this working is, plugin is receiving all the traffic with your old permalink structure and where it find the URLs with old structure it is using 301 redirection to your new setting of wordpress built-in permalinks and all links are in working condition.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve read earlier that you’ve got to make some changes to the htaccess file to modify the permalink structure which is a daunting task. This plugin does make it sound much easier. Thanks for sharing this.
Selurus´s last blog ..April Blog Review
Twitter: bloggingjunkie
April 3, 2010 at 12:21 am
This is why Unix/Linux flavour OS are not common in Desktop users, Reason non GUI and command based environment. Commands are case sensitive and if you are recalling some function after long time, i bet you will make mistake. So its better to use plugins where they are unavoidable.
Thanks for liking and comments.
I apologize! I realize I left the website blank in my prior comment for the post below and added here. Thanks!
ORIGINAL POST:
Thank you for this! I downloaded the plug in and activated it, but before I use it I just want to ask a question. When I look at the box on my screen (which you displayed above) that is supposed to show the active link “old permalink structure” it is empty – nothing in it. Is this because I am just using the default permalink structure – something like /?p=123? I just want to make sure before I change the structure in wordpress that this box is supposed to be empty. I realize for the example you showed above that you actually had an old permalink structure of month and post name so I am wondering if that is why yours shows (you had one) and mine does not (I don’t have one). Any advice you can offer (before I push the save button) is greatly appreciated – thanks for the tip!
Twitter: bloggingjunkie
June 10, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Yes Melody, you are right. Reason is, you are using default link structure of wordpress that contains post numbers in it. All you need to choose permalink structure and all posts’ permalink will be updated. Its best to select a permalink structure before blog expands too much.
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