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1. hajejan
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   When I set up my WordPress blog about 3 years ago, I decided to choose '/%year%/%postname%/' as my custom permalink structure. Now, I'm regretting that quite badly, and wish I had just gone for /%postname%/

   to clarify, currently, my URLs are all like so:

   http://www.photocritic.org/2006/colour-to-black-and-white/

   but I would like them to be:

   http://www.photocritic.org/colour-to-black-and-white/

   I know I can just change the custom structure, but I'm worried about people still having bookmarks to the old URLs. Is it possible to change a setting in WordPress, or to add a line to my .htaccess to ensure that the stragglers get a 301 redirect?

2. WP4RE
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   If you have access to a control panel, such as cpanel (or hsphere, plesk), through your web host, you can add the 301 redirects quite easily. Look for an option called "Redirects" and subsequently redirect the old urls to the new. It's pretty simple and quick.

   An important note though is that Google's Page Rank values won't be passed on to the new url. So, if one of your links had a Page Rank of 5 (which is great), chances are the new url will drop to a zero. This can severely affect your search engine rankings, unfortunately. A way around this though is to contact the sites linking to the old url and ask them to please change it to the new one. This can be quite the challenge however as some of the guys might be too lazy to do so. Lots of "webmasters" are quick to add, but slow to change.

   Good luck.

3. Austin Matzko
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   Here is a plugin that claims to do just that.

4. hajejan
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   filosofo: That plugin was my saviour :)

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