Hi guys, I am thinking of changing my permalinks to get more keywords in the url of a post on Wordpress, but I worry that it will hurt my ranking in Google. I would go from this currently: http://www.mysite.com/?p=123 to this http://www.mysite.com/2009/10/the-best-post-ever/ Thoughts?
Hi diamondedge Changing the permalinks will impact your website if there are other websites linking to your old permalinks, however you can do the following to keep your ranking: 1. Create a .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect for all old links to the new links. ie: something like this: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html Do this for every permalink you're changing. 2. You can download a plug-in called "Link Juice Keeper", which will redirect all non existing url to your home page. At least this way, you're redirecting all incoming links (and therefore PR) to your home page. You can download the plug-in here: hxxp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/link-juice-keeper. Just change hxxp to http I recommend you do change the permalink since there are ways for you to keep your ranking and PR and this will benefit you more in the future. Good luck
How old is the site? Changing the link structure on a new site could have an impact on your ranking. If this is an aged domain, more then 1 - 2 years old, with plenty of backlinks, your ranking should not be affected. I have a blog that is 2+ years old, page rank 2. The URL structure has been changed 3 times in the past year with no negative impact on ranking. If you are not doing so, submit a sitemap to your google webmaster tools. That will help google pick up the changes faster and index the new pages.
You should definitely install a 301 redirect plugin for Wordpress before you do this, so that it automatically handles the individual re-directs for you (I don't know any offhand, but a "wordpress 301 plugin" search should show a few). Secondly, don't use that 2nd hierarchy you posted (http://www.mysite.com/2009/10/the-best-post-ever/) - it's not good. You'll want to get one that looks like this: www.mysite.com/category/page-name
And why is that? You will have to manually insert a variable into the post name to stop from running out of titles. Having the month/day in the post title creates a variable that can never be repeated in your blogs URL. If you use just sitename.com/blog title - sooner or later your going to run out of titles. I tried the sitename.com/blog title for about 4 months. When I reached around 100 post I found myself going back and making sure I had not used that title before. Having the date automatically inserts a variable. Wordpress already creates a category page to start with, so you do not have to set that up. You do not have to do a 301 redirect, wordpress redirects the old URL to the new URL automatically.
Nearly everyone using WordPress is actually utilizing the enhanced versions of URLs, it is great that no scripts are needed as the blog system already can do the setting by a simple click.
With this module you can control and track the redirections: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/
You can't lose you Google visitor.. I'm have doing this before.. In wordpress, for permalink like ?p=123 can redirect to your new link..
I did exactly what you're talking about a few months ago and have had very positive results. For the first month or so after I changed the link structure, visits were way down, but if you have a strong site with lots of content, it will come back up quickly. Here are some tips on how to do it well: Have a strong site with lots of content to begin with. Install the Redirection plugin for wordpress. This will automatically forward all of your old links to the new one via a 301 redirect. Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmaster tools immediately, so they can start being aware of the changes and altering its index accordingly. Try to contact webmasters wherever you have a deep link to the old URL structure and see if they can update it to the new one. I basically just went through incoming links on Google webmaster tools and got a hold of whoever I could. Pretty much everyone was more than willing to switch it over because they want a dead link from their site as little as you want the wrong link pointing to yours. Continue adding quality content once you've switched over. After the first month or so after things dipped down they started climbing back up again and every month since has had higher viewership than last and have long passed where I was at before the switch.
i had the same question when i just started blogging. and let me say you something. i have one blog with 123 permalinks- it has no difference with those that have named, what is more it has much more traffic than the others. i am happy i did not do any changes. so think twice. it is difficult to get indexed well in google from the beginning.
Dynamic Urls get indexed faster but they dont deliver any additional keywords you can use to optimize for SERP. So you have to know for yourself if you want to get indexed faster or have better SERP due to relevancy, however if you change your permalinks you will drop in serp until google grabs the new permalinks and backlinks. Of course you can speed up the process by spreading your new permalinks over the web (spread not spam) manually.
If I'm not mistaken, WP should automatically redirect the old non-SEO links to the new ones so no need to worry in terms of losing traffic (assuming you're using the built-in permalink thing), as for indexing, as others have stated make sure your sitemap is up to date.
If you have hundrends of pages in your blog.. then.. it will affect the SERP's for SOME TIME.. and you get your rankings back again after SOME TIME.
I agree with the above posters. Do the 301 redirect and be prepared for the possibility of going down in the SERP's. I changed my permalinks, and I dropped quite a bit. But it's starting to come back up...