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

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
  1. Upload your .htaccess file to your root blog directory
  2. That’s it! Sit back and enjoy

Image courtesy of jeffsmallwood Flickr

How to: Specify your canonical to avoid duplicate content in WordPress

Yahoo, Microsoft and GoogleIn a rare show of collaboration Google, Microsoft and Yahoo made a joint announcement on Thursday that that they would support a new Web standard that will allow millions of Web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their Web sites.

“There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk,” said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts. “I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly.”

“We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation,” said Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft. “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

Google Webmaster Central:

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

That’s great news for anyone out there looking for that extra bit of juice to drive some more traffic to your site and fortunately, if you’re using WordPress to publish your site, it’s pretty simple to add this functionality.
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