When I launched Shoutmeloud , I never considered SEO as big thing and with the time I realized that optimizing your blog for SEO gives you better result in search engines.
You can read about it here My strategy to make shoutmeloud search engine friendly
Initially I was using permalink as /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
which is not at all said to be the best permalink option for SEO.
so the only option which I was left with it is change the permalinks but if I do anything wrong there I might risk all my indexed WebPages as 404 pages and I can’t afford to do that.
It took me an hour to research on the best way to redirect the permalinks so that I won’t loose any traffic or none of my pages look dead, most of the posts suggested me using .htaccess method but instead of that I prefer using some plugin way which will help me changing my permalink without editing or playing with my .htaccess file.
Thanks to Dean lee Permalinks migration plugin which helped me with the migration without loosing any single page which is indexed by Google.
The plugin will generate a ” 301 redirection” or you can call it permanent redirection when bots will crawl your posts.
Download the plugin from the author page and upload it to wp-content/plugins/ directory
Now go to plugin under your admin dashboard and activate the plugin, go to settings and select permalinks migration and you will see your Old Permalink Structure there
Don’t make any changes there
now go to settings > permalinks and change it to your desired permalink.
I’m using /%postname%.html as permalink for shoutmeloud.
You can also use use category and post name as your wordpress permalinks, but before that don’t forget to see the previous post on Importance of categories for better SEO.
Link: Dean’s pemalinks migration plugin
Don’t forget to read how to install self hosted wordpress blog?
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Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 1206 articles.
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{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
Harsh, you will loss traffic. what ever you do any change in paralink structure gets affected even with 301 redirect and it takes 3 month to regain your SERP.
I have done this before and this is my personal experience. check out SEO forums for other users experience on 301 permanent redirection.
Friend I have moved from my previous blogspot to wordpress along with 400 +posts without loosing any traffic. Though maximum of 4-5 posts which got affected otherwise everything went fine.
I’m saying all this from my personal experience.
Though I have seen people facing various issue regarding this. Few days back I moved a blog from blogspot to wordpress. Redirection was successful and it was perma redirection. but there are almost 20 post which got broken .. So sometime it happens, but if done with the best way. I don’t think there will be any issue.
Though it is true that with new domain or new permalink, it takes time to get your SERP back.
Interesting plugin.
Thanks for the share.
Any reasons why you are using “/%postname%.html” besides or simply “/%postname%” ?
There are actually two reason for this : One its a personal choice and second Most of old browser or text browser render pages with .html and sometime fails to render page without .html extension.
I’m quite unsure about percentage of such browser, though keeping myself at the advantage side I’m using /%postname%.html structure.
Though now I don’t feel that using permalink structure like /%postname% is also has the same effect while considering SEO.
There was a thing that .html is good for SEO but not anymore.
Glad this answers an 1 year old question
I changed my permalink structure like yours, except for .html, and used the 301 redirect plugin. I didn’t notice that it affected my traffic but I made this change at the beginning of my blog.
I was just reading that the same thing can be done with a quick edit in the .htaccess file. It’s #5 in the list.
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/10-awesome-htaccess-hacks-for-wordpress
Kim you are right, its much easier to make changes using .htaccess method. But many users don’t find it too easy to make changes in their .htacces file. For them this plugin comes to a rescue.
Harsh,
I have been thinking to change my permalink. But, don’t have guts to do it.
My blog depends a lot on google traffic. i have arround 80-85% of total traffic on search engine.
Shall i go ahead. or let the current permastructure be there?
Advise please…
Nihar Just saw your permalink, you might change it. but you re using %date%/%post% prmalink which is fine.
It won’t make much difference here. But if you use one category per post then you can think of changing it. Using this plugin!
brother it is really gud post for SEO and also who r newer to the Wordpress field thanks it helped me….
P.K.ARUN™s last blog post..Show or hide the Recycle Bin icon in windows vista
I’m glad Arun that it helped you a lot.
Infact when I moved from blogspot to wordpress, this plugin helped me to change my permalink.
Harsh,
I came into this post out of my love for Dean’s Permalink migration plugin. It does more than just migration I think, it saves a lot of 404 erros too. Not sure if the WordPress default code is capable of detecting minor changes in permalink typo before, but after installing this one, all pages are redirected even if I edit the slug.
Great plugin
Arun Basil Lal™s last blog post..3 ways to Change WordPress Default Username
Hey harsh ..this plugin is really awesome man.
It has done the job for me…yippee!
Actually Few weeks back i tried to change my permalink structure by editing .htaccess , but i think i did something wrong at that time…so i changed it back to the older format.
Anyway thanks to its author and you too bro for finding it!!!
Harsh, Another victim here, As said by Blogsdna- My Blog Traffic is affected. I too had same URL structure (Blogspot one) like yours and changed to new one and Google has stopped indexing new URLs.
I did this change while having 775+ posts, I really took wrong decision but now facing it is the only option.
What will you suggest? How much time did it took for you?
Hi Harsh,
Great article. But my problem is its too late!!! I had the site up under the same url for a while, and then I changed it to a wordpress site and even changed my permalink structure once or twice… so now I have a lot of 404 problems!
What can I do now? Do I have to go to the .htaccess file?
txs!
Thanks a lot. I was facing the same problem that you are mentioning in this article. I was also looking for a solutin so that I do not have to edit my .htaccess file. I was a bit scary to open this file. I think this plugin option is better. I will definitely give it a try. Thanks again.
It is really a timesaver for me. I initially had the permalink as you had. Then I just used this plugin to perform 301 redirect.
It worked fine with all my previous pages and I had not got any hit on my pagerank.
One question…how do you change the category base? I don’t want to include the word /category/ in my url’s. I have tried dots and dashes, but can’t figure it out.
I am playing with it at the moment and have worked out the post changes without a problem on one of my test sites, but this ‘category’ change has me confused. Any tips?
Thanks for this! I just migrated to WP and was kind of scared as the plugin seemed pretty old! But this works just fine…
hey… its’s really great seo tips for bloggers…. i am following this… and ya i read your post in starting so i didn’t need to use that plugin but it’s really helpful… thanx for sharing..
regards,
I added the Permalinks Migration plugin and I am still having the same problems. I have done all the steps mentioned here and still get an ERROR. What could it be?
me also using .html Permalinks on my website
I am trying out with localhost and when i change permalik to %postname%.html it shows apache error. So i downloaded the above mentioned plugin and can u tell me what to enter in permalink migration. I am using the top default permalink which says wordpress/?p=123
Hi! Harsh
Recently , i change my website permalink from category/postname to
postname.html using the plugin suggested on this post!
Now problem is that , i m getting crawl error for all the post with .html extension
(postname).html/feed 404 (Not found)
What can be done to clear this issue !
Many thanks in Advance!
Regards
Pradip
Hurrey It works for me. I have just change my website permalink from /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ to /%postname%.html. This looks just awesome. Thanks Harsh Agrawal.
why u change from /%category%/%postname%.html to /%postname%.html
Hey I could not locate the plugin…..its removed……but i found this one…..Permalink Finder Plugin…..and m going to use it…………!!
thank you soo much dude i was tried lots of plugin to fix the issue of not found page after changing permalink now fix that with plugin…….Cooool