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Does changing permalinks affect se rankings?

Discussion in 'WordPress' started by Janet, Nov 2, 2009.

  1. #1
    When I set up my blogs a few years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. So, all my permalinks end something like this ?p=2222. If I changed all of the permalinks to display the post titles, would that have a negative impact on my seach engine rankings? A few of my blogs do very well in Google and I would hate to mess with that.

    What do you think?
     
    Janet, Nov 2, 2009 IP
  2. vishu123

    vishu123 Peon

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    #2
    if you change the permalink google can't find your old topic link and they give you the alert "Not Found". So the better way don't change your link.
     
    vishu123, Nov 2, 2009 IP
  3. Janet

    Janet Peon

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    #3
    Janet, Nov 2, 2009 IP
  4. jgalvez

    jgalvez Peon

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    #4
    Actually if you just want to enable permalinks WordPress automatically will redirect the default links to the new permalinks. It doesn't work the other way around though! For example on my own blog a link that ends in:

    ?p=243

    Will redirect to:

    /slacking/

    My understanding is that is uses a 302 redirect, so I'm not sure if you want to get that changed to 301 (or how to do it) but the search engines should pick up on that and update your links accordingly. I'd wait for some more advice from other members though, someone may know more details about this.
     
    jgalvez, Nov 2, 2009 IP
  5. Janet

    Janet Peon

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    #5
    Thanks for your input.

    I'll wait to see if anyone else has any thoughts on this before I do anything drastic. ;)
     
    Janet, Nov 2, 2009 IP
  6. India_Enchanter

    India_Enchanter Peon

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    #6
    switching from old permalinks to new permalinks is possible in platinum SEO plugin. Use it and play with pretty permalinks.
    Besides that if you are switching from ugly permalink which ends like ?p=2222 you will have no problem at all in switching over to new pretty permalinks even if you don't use platinum SEO.
    You can check it on mangement.thinkahead.net.in, I changed the date based permalinks to title based permalink with the help of platinum sEO
     
    India_Enchanter, Nov 4, 2009 IP
  7. theapparatus

    theapparatus Peon

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    #7
    Actually there's no need for a plugin. As noted previously, wp does this out of the box now.

    I would be checking the webserver's error logs though to make sure things are working right.
     
    theapparatus, Nov 5, 2009 IP
  8. penguinkribo

    penguinkribo Peon

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    #8
    I think he has answered your question.
     
    penguinkribo, Nov 6, 2009 IP
  9. Brent2

    Brent2 Peon

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    #9
    I switched my blog back to the defaults:

    ?p=123

    I then turned back on Permalinks:

    /%postname%/

    Going to the default address redirected fine. So I checked curl (command line, Linux):

    curl -IL UrlToCheck.com

    This indicated it's a 302 (temporary) redirect rather than a permanent 301. Seems like it really should be a 301 or, at the least, an option to switch between them. This warranted more tests.

    I tried changing the permalink structure from /%postname%/ to 2009/11/07/sample-post/ and checked to see if the Redirect worked. It did not and gave me a 404 error. This leads me to conclude that WordPress decided that it was better for browsers and search engines not to update, to prevent 404 errors later. Still, I think it'd be nice to give the option on the permalink page (with ? links for "What's this?")

    Based on this I'd say you're completely fine Janet. Pick a permalink structure you'll keep and switch over.
     
    Brent2, Nov 7, 2009 IP
  10. redthehat

    redthehat Peon

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    #10
    The permalink change over is fine, the only problem that you may encounter, which I am currently sweating over, is that my pages that are indexed have suddenly dropped in my Webmaster Tools from 130 pages to 1 page. I am sure that as the site is crawled, this will be fixed
     
    redthehat, Nov 21, 2009 IP
  11. rbagaming

    rbagaming Well-Known Member

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    #11
    rbagaming, Nov 23, 2009 IP
  12. redthehat

    redthehat Peon

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    #12
    Just a heads up, since changing my permalink structure, traffic did dip for a few days, however this has picked up a huge amount since I am now showing valuable keywords in my URL rather than ?page#

    I have done a double whammy on this one and also changed my URL to a dot com, this also resulted in a small dip in traffic, however as I had set redirects properly, and at the same time, changed my address in Google Webmaster tools, submitted new sitemaps, etc, my traffic has now improved by some 40% at least, and this is rising very rapidly
     
    redthehat, Dec 1, 2009 IP
  13. Spawned

    Spawned Member

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    #13
    you will need a good redirect plugin... that does 303's. Other ways will really mess up your ranking.
     
    Spawned, Dec 2, 2009 IP