Changing the Structure of WordPress URLs without Losing Traffic or Google Juice

by James on July 11, 2009

colon-slash-slashI’m on my way out the door, headed to my daughter’s first trip to Coney Island and the Circus, so I won’t go into all the reasons behind why I’m changing the structure of my URLs, let’s suffice it to say that I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while and, after quite a bit of research, it seems like the right move to make.

What change am I making? I’m merely taking the date out of my URLs. The problem is that I don’t want to lose all my outside links and Google traffic by changing my permalink structure. I already showed you how to migrate a WordPress site to an entirely new domain and redirect your URLs, this is just another quick customization along the same lines.

Old URL structure: http://jamespoling.com/2009/01/moving-your-wordpress-blog-to-a-new-domain-without-losing-your-incoming-traffic/
New URL structure: http://jamespoling.com/moving-your-wordpress-blog-to-a-new-domain-without-losing-your-incoming-traffic/

Step 1: Go into Settings > Permalink Settings and set up your custom permalink structure. It should look like this:
wp_permalink_structure

Step 2: Either create or edit your .htaccess file on your server. (You’ll need an FTP client to access and upload this file).

    1. Inside your .htaccess file add this line of code
      RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://jamespoling.com/$1
  2. Upload your .htaccess file to your root blog directory
  3. That’s it! Sit back and enjoy

Image courtesy of jeffsmallwood Flickr

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Related entries:

    Tagged as: , , ,

    • I forgot to mention one thing I did notice. This will break all of your previous TweetMeme Re-tweet numbers. It will not however effect your traffic since those URLs will still be forwarded to the correct URL. That's a call you have to make about whether or not seeing the old Retweet numbers is more important than making a change for better results in the future.
    • Name
      The image used on this post wasn't attributed as documented by the Creative Commons license under which this photo was originally published. You are of course free to use it, but you should abide by the CC terms.

      http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffsmallwood/2992...

      http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2....
    • Hi Jeff (I presume) I have added an attribute link. Thank you for pointing it out. The lack of attribution was not intentional. Let me know if the current link will suffice.
    • Yep, it was me. The attribution works best just below the image (like a footer at the bottom of the image), and many times those that use the images make the actual images a link, with the link going to the photo page for the photographer. That's just a suggestion though for future reference, I'm not asking you to change it. Thanks for adding the attribution. I figured it wasn't intentional, but thanks for saying so :)
    • that is a fantastic and smart idea.
    • That is a very smart Idea. No brainer.
    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Previous post:

    Next post: