If you don’t like your current permalinks (permanent link) structure or consider it ugly permalinks. But you’re left without a choices to change it, because you don’t want your pages become 404 pages if you change them into more cute permalinks. No problem because there are number of plugins that could safely change your ugly permalink structure into prety permalinks without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.
These plugins will tell search engines and also browsers that the old/ugly permalink permanently, like this:
http://www.blogname.com/?p=123
Into pretty permalink like this:
http://www.blogname.com/post-title (/%postname%/)
or
http://www.blogname.com/category-name/post-title ( /%category%/%postname%/)
Is changed into new permalink structure.
Therefore the old addresses should be changed by the new ones. People use to call this activity a “301 Redirect” or “Permanent Redirect”. By doing this Search engines will immediately update their indexing process and as a result you’re not going to lose pagerank and your traffic will stand still as if nothing ever happened. This also works for Search engines, browser, links from other sites and bookmarks.
And here are 3 Permalink migration or Redirect plugins I recommend:
1. Permalinks Migration Plugin
2. Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin
3. Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin
Thus from now on you shouldn’t be affraid of losing your traffic, ranking and your page detected as 404 pages by Search engines and browsers if changing your current permalink structure to the new structures.
And this post is a promise I made in previous post about removing the word category in WordPress category url.
Good day and see you in the next post.
About Isa Nagib