Changing the permalink structure for a wordpress blog may have your inbound links end up as 404 not found errors because they’re pointing at an old link structure. Changing your permalink structure is something you have to consider quite thoroughly before doing. It may not be common sense to future think and know what the impact of such a change would make, but it’s what you have to do. Do not make changes to your permalink structure without knowing the implications. Can it be easy and seamless? I just found out that it can.

You may or may not know my story of how I once weighed 475 pounds and then took it upon myself to learn about health, nutrition and fitness and lose 300 pounds of fat. I then took up bodybuilding and gained another 50 to 60 pounds of lean muscle. I first began a website about it where I wrote about natural weight loss, health, fitness, tips and tricks etc and then in 2004 began a blogger blog on the backend of my website. My expertise was in microsoft, IIS, Active Server Pages and I used what I knew.

Enter wordpress blogs

I see how wordpress is much easier, much more robust, has the ability to make changes and allows for many plugins and automatic RSS feeds. It’s just plain easy for anyone to get started blogging and for a seasoned expert / programmer / html designer to get into simply and easily.

I began a new wordpress blog and launched it using th keyword phrase weight loss blog. It has quickly become a great resource for people wanting to learn how to take action on their health and weight loss by learning, being accountable and by taking action… and then getting support.

I chose the permalink structure early on having the category followed by the postname which is just good SEO.

in the options -> permalinks tab in the wordpress dashboard, you set the permalinks to “custom” and enter /%category%/%postname%.html

%category% and %postname% are variables that get replaced with the category and the postname, so by entering in the text above you end up with a post something like www.formerfatguyblog.com/weight-loss/how-i-lost-300-pounds-my-weight-loss-story.html. It has the domain name, a keyword phrase (the category) and then the post name followed by .html

This was how it was up until I decided to have guest authors.

The idea behind guest authors was to have the actual expert in their field write and educate the reader in their chosen field of expertise, then provide a revenue sharing model for them so that they not only educate and inspire, but then split the income from the advertisements. It would then be in their best interest to promote their author page and their posts driving traffic to the site. Each author doing this would results in more net views, more lives changed, more people educated and a cross promotion system going on. A person coming to the site to learn about Emotional Freedom Technique would then also learn about exercise from a top ranked personal trainer. Then maybe learn about creating more passion in their relationships from the teachings of another writer. More passionate relationships, better support for the person on the weight loss mission, less stress and better results. win-win.

This is the model I’m adapting and promoting.

However, one possible problem arises. Duplicate page names. Duplicate titles to posts. Rare yes, but possible. Two authors may enter the same name for the post which would then cause a system crash of sorts. Avoiding this would be a good idea.

Changing the permalink structure to reduce this possibility is the direction I’m taking.

By adding in the year and the month of the post, the odds of two posts being entered with the same name in the same category, in the same year and same month is highly unlikely. This also allows for the reader to then read older posts by date (year and month) within a category.

The permalink structure has been changed to /%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Crash.

Well, not crash, but certainly not good either.

All the links I had in place from my previous marketing are now dead. They pointed to the old name and are now all turning up 404 not found.

Not exactly.

Normally, a bunch of work in the .htaccess file would be required to capture the old inbound links, process them, and then redirect them with a 301 redirect to the new page.

Have YOU got time to do that? Me either.

Enter Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin which does this all automatically with an upload, a click and then a change to the new Wordpress permalink structure.

I’ll tell you how easy this was: I had a new author log into the site and text me a message (SMS) that she was writing a post. I texted her back saying “hold on a minute, I have to make a change”. Then downloaded the plugin, unzipped it, uploaded it, activated it, clicked on the plugin tab, clicked update, changed the permalink structure and then texted the author back saying “it’s good to go”.

That was it. Painless, and she was impressed too at how fast I did that.

Now my goal is to track the inbound links to the old posts and update them as best I can.

Changing your wordpress permalink structure might seem to be complicated and scary to do, but with Deans Permalink Migration Plugin, my job was done in two minutes.

Update: Spoke too soon. Seems this plugin will not work in all circumstances. It does not like %category% in the url structure that I pointed out above. Even after removing the %category% part, it still wouldn’t work. I de-activated the plugin, reverted back to the original permalink structure and will tackle this again when I have more time and more information.

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Tags: Permalinks, Plugins, Wordpress