Changing categories without losing backlinks

When I started my blog, I wasn't all that familiar with SEO and ended up with some poor categories on my WP blog. An example of a category would be Tools For The Garden (http://www.domain.com/categories/tools-for-the-garden).

I'd like to change this category to something SEO friendly such as Garden Tools.

The problem is that I have so many backlinks from other domains pointing to Tools For The Garden that if I change the category, I'll lose all of these backlinks will be lost and have to start over. The links are to many to have to go to each website to tell the webmaster to update their link.

Is there any way to tell Google that any link that points to tools-for-the-garden should now be credited to "garden-tools"

Thank you

 

You can do a 301 redirect. That should solve the problem.

 

Stupid question, but how do you do a 301 redirect and if you do that, will all the links and PR pointing to the old url now point to the new url?

 

work back on all ur pr links

 

Yeah, 301 redirect is the way to go.

As for how, just google for 'how to set up a 301 redirect' or something similar and you'll find many howto articles.

And yes, all PR juice from your old links will be transferred to the new ones and Google will automatically reindex your pages correctly as soon as it crawls your site the next time.

 

I don't think you need to do the change, you url is fine i think.

 

If you use WP, there's an easy way to redirect, with a Redirection plugin that is available here: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

 

Use the wp redirection plugin as mentioned above! it does wonders and makes your life easier

 

Thanks, plugins are great but with later versions of WP, the plugin may work so I think an htaccess solution would be best. Just need to Google some good code for this.

 

Yep, do it with .htaccess and it'd done for good. Messing around with WP plugins takes more time in the end and you have to take care about updating your plugins etc.