Change Your Permalinks Without 404


7 Must Have WordPress Killer Plugins: Change Your Permalinks Without 404

Changing the link structure of your WordPress entries can hugely improve your blogs SEO, but what if you’ve already been running your blog for a while and now realize you could improve the SEO with a better links structure?

If your simply using the WordPress Permalinks for the first time, there’s no problem, but what if you have opted, as most beginning bloggers do, for the classic month/day/postname structure and now realize you’d love to use the category name, or just the post name without more, for your links?

404!

Unless of course you’re a mod_rewrite specialist, you will probably decide not to change the structure because you are afraid to lose too much SE traffic. And who wants to redirect every single 404 to the homepage?
Good themes have a smart 404 page, but many themes lack in this area, and probably you will decide not to change the link structure.

Fear not, one of the most powerful (and smallest) WordPress plugins will help you in this: Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin.
This plugin does everything needed: grab the old permalinks structure you used for your WP blog and redirect every old link to the new post links.

Discover how to use Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin in our 6th episode of 7 Must Have Killer WordPress Plugins. It’s the simplest plugin ever! All you have to do is visit the WordPress Permalinks section of your blog, set the new structure and add the old structure in Dean’s plugin. Done.

Flash video: 5:13 in duration

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Episode links:

Tubetorial made by Michael Pick, a professional video editor and screencaster, when he is not swearing at Final Cut Pro on his Mac Book Pro.


Tubetorial

30 Comments

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  1. Great video !

    My problem is Categories though, not Permalinks.

    Can you tell me how to change Category names and not lose all the links I have out in the search engines ?

  2. I have to agree that the default WordPress URL, really sucks. I am a new blogger and recently discovered that my blog was lacking in seo. This video made it very easy to understand and install, plus configure the plugin….

    Thanks……

  3. After installing the plugin and updating all settings, my old links in Google are taking forever to download. I had #6 and #11 for my key word and I’m worried that the long download times are going to hurt my traffic.

    Anyone else have this problem? I’m using a hosted WordPress install with version 2.3.1.

    Thanks!

    Greg

  4. Hi,

    I’m trying to migrate from the default wordpress permalink structure. When I enter / as the old permalink structure, it doesn’t create redirects. The old sucky permalink continues to render as it always has. What do I need to enter for the old permalink structure to get it to create a redirect?

    Thanks

  5. Everyone is Happy, Thansks very good information, i try to change the permalink structure but everything was terrible. Finaly someone make a solution.

  6. Thank you for this post. More importantly, thanks for the site. I am going to absorb as much as possible. I will subscribe, thank you very much!

  7. I have been blogging for some time, and in fact run one for each of over a dozen of my main products, yet I have avoided tampering with the Permalinks settings up until very recently.

    When I first tried to make a change, I had all sorts of errors, which as it turns out were the result of not fixing my .htaccess file.

    At that time, I changed the permissions to writable, and then WP re-wrote the file when I change the Permalink settings. I then just changed the permissions on the .htaccess file back, and all is safe and secure again.

    Another point would be to get rid of the “www.” where you set your blog url. The close you can move keywords to the beginning of the url the better.

    So, instead of “https://www.RonaldDavies.com”, I changed the settings under the “General” tab in WP to reflect the blog being at “https://RonaldDavies.com”.

    This way, and following category or post os moved left by 4 characters, and Google counts every one of ’em!

    Cheers,

    great blogging!

    Ron

  8. what was the need for wordpress to remove permalinks from 2.7.1 it is causing a lot of inconvenience to all.

  9. wow, great tutorial and done in only 2 minutes. Thank you very mutch. Took some searching and a bit of time to find this tutorial but it worked perfectly !

    Thank you very much!

  10. This was/is a great tutorial.

    I just upgraded my blog to WP2.9 and also MySQL 5.0 from 4.0 and it has been hellish!

    But somehow finally got the import of my database to take but all the internal pages were reading as Error 404 until I landed on this page of wisdom.

    Affiliate Marketing Guy Ron Davies’ comment was the nail that clinched this coffin.

    Once I got rid of the “www” in my blog URL every thing was just fine and dandy! Now that’s what I call solid advice!

    Great Tutorial…three thumbs up!

  11. I just changed my default permalinks to
    (/%category%/%postname%/)
    ..after doing this clicking on a post ..take to an error window.
    Plz Help.

  12. Simply the best tutorial out there on the subject! I spent an hour browsing through other site for this info and about 3 minutes on your site and gotterdone! Thanks so Much!

  13. hi friends,
    plugins is temporary solution ,so that try to permanently,one of the reason plugins take time to load

  14. Hi,
    first of all, I would like to thank whoever made this article and the video. I find the video very funny yet USEFUL. It does help me a lot.
    I like the way Michael expressed his opinions in the video.
    Good one!

  15. this plugin did not work for me. i triple-checked that i put the correct ‘old’ path. help!

  16. Can you tell me how to change Category names and not lose all the links I have out in the search engines ?
    tr..

  17. Hello, I’m having an issue concerning a permalink change, from /%post%/ to /%post% many months ago. I have been receiving a ton of 404 page errors ever since and tried to remove them using the Google Webmaster Tools to no avail. They seem to come back as 404 errors. I want Google and other search engines to index my tags. I have blocked them from indexing my categories, archives, etc.

    What I’m getting are urls with an ending back slash which causes the 404 error. Also, I have deleted many tags many months ago that keep showing up in those 404 errors as well. So in other words, the deleted tags and ending / are both causing the 404 errors.

    Take a look below…

    https://internettvdotcom(dot)com/tag/premium-tv-for-pc-download/
    404 (Not found) 5 pages Dec 24, 2011

    https://internettvdotcom(dot)com/tag/internet-tv-quality/
    404 (Not found) 4 pages Dec 24, 2011

    https://internettvdotcom(dot)com/satellitetvtopc/ => no tag
    404 (Not found) 10 pages Dec 24, 2011

    I’m looking for a permanent solution to this issue and wondering if anyone has any ideas.

    Will Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin help?