Changing Wordpress Permalink Structure

18th November 2007

I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

Another reason is that someone sent me an e-mail recently asking me if I’m such an expert, why aren’t my own permalinks optimized for best performance. Well that person had a good point, and my answer was that I didn’t know any better when I first set it up, and I’ve just been too busy/lazy to change them.

As more and more users look at the URLs in their browser status bar before they click, having keywords in your URLs is going to improve click-throughs. For example, a while ago I wrote a blog post called “Things to hate about office 2007″ and I needed to send someone a link to it.

When I pasted the URL I saw this - http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/462 and that’s just not very compelling or informative. However, once I changed my permalinks, it looked like this - http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/microsoft/things-to-hate-about-office-2007/

“Are you crazy?” you might be asking yourself… Doesn’t changing your URL’s or permalinks create 404 errors? Well yes it does, but not if you do 301 redirects.

“Are you even more crazy?” you might be thinking… “Isn’t doing dozens or hundreds of 301 redirects a complete pain in the neck?” well, yes it HAS been in the past, but there’s a cool pliugin called Deans Permalinks Migration that makes the process so easy that it’s hard to believe.

With 301 redirects in place for all of my old URL’s, there’s minimal risk of losing search visibility, all of my indexed URLs will still work, all of my inbound links will still work, and finally, the Google PageRank should flow to the new pages I’ve created with the next update.

The downside is of course that all the pages are a PR0 until the next update, and possibly two, but since you can’t sell links anymore, who really cares?

Check out the plug-in, and if you want to see how easy it is to use, I’ve added a 3 minute video -