Unpossibilities…

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, its use avoids link rot. Most modern weblogging, including Wordpress, support such links. Permalinks are often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

But what if you want to change your permalink structure, from:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

to:

/blog/archive/%postname%/

Doing so will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid, moreover, losing visitors from other sites or bookmarks that links to you.

By using Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin you can safely update your permalink structure. This plugin will generate a “301 Redirect” when users or spiders visit your site through old permalinks, and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post.

I’ve updated my permalink structure to:

/journal/archive/%postname%/

…because using the date in the URL wasn’t relevant to my posts or its content. It makes sense for the URL to contain relevant information about the page content, and not information that isnt useful to both humans and bots.

Thank you Dean Lee for this great plugin!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 9:25 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.