My good friend Damien Riley who runs Postcards From The Funny Farm informed me how he sets his permalinks and why he sets them the way he does. I had always been setting my permalinks to be “dragonblogger.com/YYYY/MM/Article Name” format so I can easily see which articles are from which month and year. There was a logical way to do this for me, but I didn’t realize the negative SEO side to having your permalinks set this way.

Damien had set all of his permalinks to “site.com/Article Name” so simple yet so effective. By not having the date in the URL indexed by Google your post can be re-edited and updated with information, then republished and be BRAND NEW. If you edited and updated a post but the post still had a URL of say /2008/09/Greatest_Post/ the fact that the URL showed it was an article from 2008 would never clue anybody in that it was updated and may deter users from clicking on your link.

So I have decided to rip the band aid off and redo all of my permalinks, this was easy by editing the wordpress admin -> tools -> permalinks section.

Select the custom radial dial and set your permalinks to /%postname%/ which will change all existing links and links going forward.

This will completely screw up every single post you have indexed on Google until your blog is completely re-indexed, fortunately I made all my 404 redirect pages go directly to my home page, so at least when people click on my Google page they arrive at my valid home page and don’t see an error page.

I did this because I think in the end it is worth it so you can recycle posts and add updated content to maximize your readership and not have your posts look dated when they are indexed by Google.

But there is good news, I have tested 4 plug-ins for wordpress and found the Permalinks Moved Permanently plug-in works the best for automatically redirecting /YYYY/MM structure to your new structure, now every link works and the old URI links redirect to the correct page.  The Redirection plug-in itself does not automatically do this for date based permalinks only query (?) based ones and requires many manual steps.  If you are going to change your permalink structure I recommend you use Permalinks Moved Permanently.

-Dragon Blogger

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