Changing permalinks in WordPress: will it hurt my site in Search Engines?
Here is a example of what this means:
http://www.mysite.com/?p=123
to this
http://www.mysite.com/2008/10/the-best-post-ever/
is considered changing Permalinks.
Answer is Absolutely if these pages are indexed in Google/Yahoo/Bing.
Changing the permalinks will impact your website if there are other websites linking to your old permalinks, however you can do the following to keep your ranking.
. Create a .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect for all old links to the new links.
ie: something like this:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html
Do this for every permalink you’re changing.
2. You can download a plug-in called “Link Juice Keeper“, which will redirect all non existing url to your home page. At least this way, you’re redirecting all incoming links (and therefore PR) to your home page. You can download the plug-in here: hxxp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/link-juice-keeper.
Just change hxxp to http
I recommend you do change the permalink since there are ways for you to keep your ranking and PR and this will benefit you more in the future.
If you are really determined to do this,
Here are my suggestions:
ere are some tips on how to do it well:
1. Have a strong site with lots of content to begin with.
2. Install the Redirection plugin for wordpress. This will automatically forward all of your old links to the new one via a 301 redirect.
3. Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmaster tools immediately, so they can start being aware of the changes and altering its index accordingly.
Try to contact webmasters wherever you have a deep link to the old URL structure and see if they can update it to the new one. I basically just went through incoming links on Google webmaster tools and got a hold of whoever I could. Pretty much everyone was more than willing to switch it over because they want a dead link from their site as little as you want the wrong link pointing to yours.
Continue adding quality content once you’ve switched over.
Think twice before changing permalinks. Be wary of changing permalinks and meta tags.
