How to Change Wordpress Permalinks without affecting Google

Wordpress Permalinks, first key to make your site SEO friendly. But wordpress by default uses the permalinks structures such as

and this is not really a good idea cause it will return your topics url which will look like this below

And say for the instance you’ve already has a handful of topics that has been posted for a while and google has indexed it. So now you want to change your Wordpress Permalinks to a much more friendly url settings such as

Yes you can easily upgrade your structure from WordPress Admin options but all the links indexed by google wont be able to land on the proper topics. So how you fix this issue. I’ve done some research on it and found out there is an excellent plugin that does the job seamlessly. It’s written by deanlee.com, it’s called the Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress. Just Install as usual and activate it and it will do the rest of the job.

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permenantly moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called 301 Permanent Redirect which actually helps the search engines to update their index quickly as possible.

In case if you are interested I’ve got an 1 line solution for your .htaccess file. add this line on top of the WordPress specific codes in the .htaccess file. Here is the line, don’t forget to change the domain name/path.

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9-/]+) http://www.ruhanirabin.com/$1

It must be in one line. Save you .htaccess and you are on the go. Googles old index will still be able to find your content with your new permalink structure.

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About Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin is the original owner and author of this blog. He also reviews web 2.0 startups at Tech2all.com. Largely interested in web 2.0 apps & Social Media. Currently the Vice President of MOL Access Portal (MOL is owner of Friendster.com). Also he is Web 2.0 & Social Media Researcher and a Total fun Geek!.. There you have it ;)

Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/ruhanirabin