Hi, I started a blog with limited categories, now I wish to widen my keywords hence willing to expand categories. What will happen if I move posts from current category to a new one? Does it need 301 redirect? Can I do it simply by moving posts from one category to other? Will all posts be unreached? 404 error will be shown in webmasters tool? I do not have category in parmalink i.e. it is in form http://www.xyz.com/myfirst post There is no category in URL i,e, http://www.xyz.com/category/my first post Please let me know. I am looking for expert advice. Thanks and regards, Wordpecker
You will want to do a 301 redirect for all articles you move between categories. I think Wordpress might set these up for you automatically if you move articles between categories, but you will have to verify that, I am not sure.
I checked this and Wordpress is doing it automatically but wondering how search engines will take this scenario. Wordpress does not require any 301 for redirection I guess.
Not sure of your question. If the 301 is working correctly then you should be in good shape. The search engines will be able to follow the URL and understand it is the same article but at a new URL. There may be a brief dip in rankings, but long term you should be in good shape. Keep in mind that when doing a 301 redirect you do lose a small portion of the PR, the full amount does not transfer to the new URL, but it typically does not have much of an affect.
Hi there, A few months ago, i did the same thing what you want to do. At that time i had 25k indexed pages in google. After chancing the name of the category, google webmastertools started to give crawl errors. In google search, because of the links of my posts was in ''old category name'' if the visitor clicks on my link in google, they just got 404 error page. after this point and because of crawl errors, google started to deleting my indexs. (I saw this problems like 1-2 weeks after i changed my category names) And it really made change in SERP. less index -> 404 errors = SERP position gone bad. I looked for a solution for this problem and i found a useful solution. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalinks-moved-permanently/ Just install this plug in, then no matter how many time you change your link structure/category name etc. The plugin does it automatic. You dont even need any configuration. Plugin description: Have a nice day!