Fun with 301 Redirect and Permalinks

In my post on Permalinks I made the following statement:

As the article above says, please be careful to remember that if you change the permalink structure on your blog in WordPress it will change all the links that you have already published, and that could screw you up if you or someone else has linked to them. I am sorry to say that there is no way to not have this problem. So you can remember to do this from the time you set up your blog, or you can bite the bullet and just change for the better and forget the past.

After posting this I got a great comment from David LaFerney correcting and saying that yes you can change your permalink information and use a 301 redirect to not have the links get lost.

Actually, if you change your permalink structure you can 301(permanent redirect) the old addresses to the new ones using your htaccess file.

So that got me thinking that if you could do that, then why not use a plugin to help with this process. You would normally have to manually edit your .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect. While this is not a hard thing to do, not everyone is cool with mucking around with the code associated with their blog. Besides, sometimes the .htaccess files is a hidden file and can be hard to find.

So I did some looking and found this plugin Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang. With this plugin, all you have to do is install it and activate, and then when you are up and going the instructions on the site and the interface on your blog will walk you through the rest of the work.

Just remember that you should take the time to set up your permalinks the way you want them before you activate and set up this plugin. Why? As I was reminded by David, if you change the redirect too many times in a row this could hurt your Google ranking / search engines listings.

Also remember that changing the permalink structure of your WordPress blog is one of the easiest SEO / Findability steps you can take.

I hope this helps to clear up my little mistake form the earlier post. Will this make you all more likely to try and change your permalink structure? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for Reading!