If you are running a CMS site or blog on WordPress and wants to change the permalink structure i.e. the URL of posts then you can think about losing previous backlinks which your site is already having. Because once the permalink structure will change to a new structure, old structure may show 404 pages. If you want to change the permalink structure to a new value and want to redirect old URL to the new one, then you can do it using a simple plugin.
Why Should You Change Permalink?
WordPress is more than 90% search engine optimized and there is no doubt about it, then why should you change the default permalink structure or make some changes in later stage of blogging? Answer is very simple, if you want to make your site’s URL easier for people then you should change the structure to some readable format. If you keep the default strucrue, it shows post-d with a question mark at end which is not easier for people to remember or not good for search engines as well. That’s why you choose to change it by adding post-title, category, post-id, year, month in the permalink. But what if that change happened after couple of months of blogging? Then in that case, if you go ahead and change the structure, you will loose the backlinks of your previous URLs. That’s why you should install such plugin to keep old link juices with your site only.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration is a plugin of wordpress to redirect old permalink structure to the new one and in this case your site will not loose PageRank as well. As we all know that 301 redirects are considered as permanent redirect and in that case search engine treats the new page as the same as the old page. So for search engines, nothing changed and you will keep receiving the same amount of traffic to the new address as well.
Installation of this permalink migration plugin is similar to the other plugin and this plugin is also available on WordPress SVN directory. ere is the link to this plugin,
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalinks-migration-plugin-for-wordpress/
Once you will install this plugin, you can see a new tab as “PermalinksMigration” under settings tab. Go to the new tab and there you can provide the old permalink structure which you want to redirect. Limitation of this plugin is that it can redirect only one format of permalink i.e. it has only one box to provide the old permalink structure. If you plan to change the permalink again for your site, in that case you will have to think about some other option.
Screenshot of PermalinksMigration plugin,
Share your favorite permalink structure which you uses or recommend others to use for their website. Or if you are facing issues related to the permalink structure of your site, post your queries in this section.