How to switch to "fancy permalinks" in Wordpress in a search-engine-friendly way?

I have been using Wordpress with the dynamic ("ugly") permalinks. I need to switch to fancy permalinks because that is a requirement for the WP Super Cache mod, which I need for server reasons.

I can simply switch to fancy permalinks in Wordpress's admin panel, but that will confuse search engines. The old links won't redirect to the new URLs, which means search engine's won't count all of my old links towards the new URLs. Do you understand the problem? Do you know a way to switch over to "fancy permalinks" without throwing off the search engines?

Thanks,
Scott

 

You need to 301 redirect the old urls to the new ones, then you should be fine. Although you may see a slight drop in traffic while google is finding all the redirects but it should return to normal. Doesn't happen all the time but just to let you know in case it does.

Here is a plugin to do the redirect
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

 

Dean's Permalinks Migration plugin

Edit: Sorry. Didn't realize that's what Youngmaster had posted. But I can verify it works like a charm.

 

I already tried it, and it only seems to work to redirect one version of "fancy URLs" to another format of "fancy URLS." It does not seem to support redirecting "ugly URLs" to "fancy URLs." ("Ugly URLs being the default dynamic URLs with the question mark, e.g. site.com?id=214 )

Thanks,
Scott

 

301's will slow you're visitors down, but I guess it's the only way I can think of.

 

I changed to "fancy permalinks" and then added the WP Super Cache mod, and one of them is redirecting old URLs to the new ones, so it looks like all is okay... hopefully.

Now I am looking for a way to lighten phpBB.

Thanks,
Scott

 

I think it's called vBulletin.

 

or myBB

TBH, from a Develeoper/Designer perspective, phpBB 3 is pretty poor. I was talking with a customer about it as i'd had a look at it re a solution for them as a forum.

The CSS repeats itself over and over again, it's a total mess. They also changed the <?php ?> to <!-- --> which the logic of escapes me as thats the syntax for commenting. Do yourself a favour and take a look at myBB or BBpress

http://www.mybboard.net/
http://bbpress.org/forums/

 

Does it affect if i don't redirect my old pages?
rather change the url history from .htaccess file?