I've started blogging 4 months back. Just submitting my articles in it. The url was wordpress default permalink. example: http://www.onlinedownloads.org/diary/?p=123 Later on I was advised that I should make the url as www.domain.com/%category%/%postname%/ So I changed the url format. It's almost 20 days that I've changed the url format. But till now the new format has not been considered by the search engines. How should inform my changes?
As a first step, try to get a sitemap-plugin for wordpress and let it generate a sitemap. Register with google webmaster tools and give google the URL to your sitemap. This should help.
Hey! Thanx for the suggestion. I've just added the sitemap for my blog which is a subdomain of my site. When I was just checking for that, I found an error in my webmaster helpcenter something Error 1: URL unreachable /robots.txt unreachable which says Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn't crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl. Another error was Error 2: "URLs timed out/DNS lookup timeout We received a timeout on DNS lookup". How should I manage that? Any suggestion would be appreciated.
verify that site to google webmaster console and see if google has crawled without errors... I think there is a permalink redirection (1 permalink to other) technique using .htaccess. If i find it i would post here.
If your site is indexed under the old url structure then you will want to 301 those old urls into the new ones. Once Google bot visits the old url they will see the redirect and update their index. I believe the permalink redirect plugin will do that for you just with the default settings, if not then you can certainly configure it to do that. After you install the plugin make sure it is giving you 301's and not 302's (something weird I saw after installing it one time). It looks like you are not the only person with this problem. Here are the relevant links. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014766.html http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/8b6b02cdc8583973/
Thanx for the plugin. I've already activated it. Still no changes in the google results. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:http://www.onlinedownloads.org/diary&btnG=Google+Search Do I need to do anything more? How to check that?
It takes time. Google needs to spider the old urls and find the redirects. Then it will update the urls displayed in the index. The time that this takes will vary based upon the crawl frequency of the pages on your site. Once you 301 the old urls to the new urls you should be good to go. Nothing else to do after that. You can use Live HTTP Headers to see what response code you get when you visit a page. I checked the pages for you and it looks like they are all 302s Which is not Cool. You need 301s. I was having the same problem with the plugin when I downloaded the latest version. I ended up reverting back to a older version which I had a copy of and that works fine. I don't think there is a download link on the site for the older version, so if you want to try reverting back to the older version pm me and I will send you a copy. I need to email the developer of the plugin about this.
Hello YoungMaster! Can you send me the older version? If it works good, i would definitely need that.