Wordpress Permalinks Question

[bam bam]

This is my site - SkateFurther | Long Distance Skateboarding

As you can see i have a fair amount of content and we get a good number of visitors.
Most of our traffic is organic FTR.

If i was to change the Permalink structure, would it fuck with my site?
If so, how can i do it without cocking it all up?

 

[Aequitas]

This is my site - SkateFurther | Long Distance Skateboarding

As you can see i have a fair amount of content and we get a good number of visitors.
Most of our traffic is organic FTR.

If i was to change the Permalink structure, would it fuck with my site?
If so, how can i do it without cocking it all up?

I recommend that you don't unless you can do some .htacess tricks which will keep your site from not being duplicate content hit.

If your pages are all indexed with say /category/post-title and then you go and change /category/post-title to just /post-title then Google thinks that /post-title is a completely new page on your site even though its not and when they see this they will give you a duplicate content penalty and that page won't get indexed.

Worse off is that since you changed your permalinks to /post-title the page /category/post-title that was indexed will make Google think that page no longer exists and that is bad news.

This can be done but you need to do a 301 re-direct using .htacess (Also a bit more specific to your actual site) and then double check to make sure your sitemap files have been updated to match your new link structure.

It can be done but may not be the best solution.

Check out the following for more info.

Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress
Wordpress SEO : Change to a new permalink structure while maintaining the old one | Fili's tech
How To Change WordPress Permalink Structure with Permalink Redirect Plugin | SYP
Customize & Change Permalinks in Wordpress

 

[bam bam]

Fuck, i should have changed it to be more SEO friendly before posting but forgot.
At the min it's all numbers and shit.

Thanks for the help dude.

 

[Gumby!]

Do you know a decent PHP scripter?

It really wouldn't be too hard to switch over. The only problem is you'd probably have to write your own script, the plugins Aequitas suggested only work when changing from something like /year/month/postname to /category/postname. You are using the default WP links structure, i.e. /?p=123 and you want to switch to a permalink structure.

All you need to do is set up a rewrite rule to catch requests with the default WP link structure and run them through a custom script that gets the info from the WP DB and does a 301 redirect to the new url.

Then you could switch to the new permalink structure in WP

You'd still take a little hit in Google, that happens anytime you make sweeping changes to a site, but you should recover fairly quickly.