Ok guys, My blog's about a month old..and there are about 50 posts I have made. Google and Yahoo are now picking it up well and I am getting some traffic which is all good! Being a novice, I now see that the permalinks setting is set at 'custom structure'-/%postname%. Is the correct? good?
Most important thing while you choose your permalinks settings is not to get duplicated links while you are posting to your blog, and to prevent the duplication you probably need to set a number or a date to be added to your permalinks, so let me tell you something about it: I use this settings (old school) : /%postname%.html Sometimes I think I did a mistake because my blog Famous Bloggers is a kind of multi-author blog and I should change my setting to included a date or something! Top sites use this settings (they post more than once a day): /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ most blogs use this settings: /%postname%/ or /%postname% if your blog is new then you better set your settings or change now and don't do it again! Make sure to read this post about Definite Guide to WordPress Permalinks before you change your permalinks settings for better understanding:
I think wordpress already takes care of that for you when your .htaaccess file is updated. I have changed my permalink settings several times, and all of the old urls were redirected to the new url with no plugin required.
Dont clutter the url with too much things I use %postname% after the site name - so it will be short and to the point.
I know that, mate If your site already indexed by search engine, then you replace with the new permalink while your new permalink are not yet indexed by search engines so when someones open your site from the search engine result, they will find Error 404 - Not Found