Alex Reid

When I changed my web site a couple years ago to use WordPress, for some reason I thought I was going to be writing daily blog posts. So I made my WordPress permalink structure: /year/month/day/postname only to find myself with long URLs that really weren’t needed and at worst scared off friends from checking my mentions on facebook.

After talking to a few people about the permalinks, I’ve been recently determined to change this but I was worried about losing my search engine ranking as for some reason despite my irregular postings prior to 2010, I have a pretty good ranking. For example, I found that a mere mention of a client’s name would give my web site a higher ranking than said client’s website.

So how could I change my permalink structure without writing a 301 redirect for each blog post?

Answer: Dean’s Permalink Migration WordPress plug-in

It only works once, but it works and that’s the only thing that matters when it comes to preserving your seo clout. Now my blog posts are simply: /year/postname. I doubt I’ll ever write the same blog title twice in one year and so what if I do, WordPress will simply attribute a number to the URL stating the repeat.