Careful when changing permalinks... | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

I found a bunch of dead links using the "View Broken Links" plugin for Wordpress. It seems some sites have been updating their post permalinks without adding redirects. Unfortunately, you guys lose link juice when that happens so be careful and check the old link can reach the new one (IIRC, the latest Wordpress will handle this automatically if you change post title, but not if you change post permalink structure. You'll need to adjust that in your .htaccess).

On a related note, a nice plugin for doing redirects is called Quick Page/Post Redirect.

20s Finances said:

Interesting – I've often regretted not changing my permalink structure on 20's Finances until it was too late. Are you telling me it is possible to make the switch and maintain the link juice? How much work is this to do it in the .htacess file?

Invest It Wisely said:

I found a bunch of dead links using the "View Broken Links" plugin for Wordpress. It seems some sites have been updating their post permalinks without adding redirects. Unfortunately, you guys lose link juice when that happens so be careful and check the old link can reach the new one (IIRC, the latest Wordpress will handle this automatically if you change post title, but not if you change post permalink structure. You'll need to adjust that in your .htaccess).

Hey Corey,

You do the work once and it's done. For example, here is a .htaccess I set up for a personal blog I started ages ago:

# BEGIN Redirect section

# Wordpress permalink structure changes and renames: August 2008
Redirect 301  /2007/08/22/post1 /post1
Redirect 301  /2007/07/30/post2 /post2
Redirect 301  /2007/07/10/post3 /post3

… etc …

# END Redirect section

There might be a smarter way to do that, but that's the way I used.

I used Dean's Permalink Redirect Plugin. Worked like a charm. Added everything I needed and saved the link juice. My SE traffic increased after the change.

Like Eric, I have also used Dean's Permalink Redirect Plugin and it worked out really well. 

You change your permalink structure to /postname/ (Settings->Permalink).

Then you give your old permalink structure to the plugin. That's all the plugin needs.

In my case, my old structure was /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html  So this is what I gave the plugin as an input.

All your posts (new and old) will automatically start using the /postname that you set in the Settings->Permalink

The plugin will 301 redirect all your old posts with the date  to /postname. When you  just republish, it will take /postname since that's what you have set in the Wordpress Settings.

Hope this makes sense. Feel free to email me if you need help.