AhTim.com

What is Permalinks?

Permalinks is url that you use to publish your blog’s post. For example, the default wordpress permalinks is http://<domainname>/?p=<number>. To make your blog post SEO friendly, you must change the permalinks format in order to let search engine crawl your url as well as for your reader to access your blog’s entry in better sense.

How to change Permalinks format?

Many blogger thought that change the permalinks format in permalinks option will do. Yes, if you are a beginner blogger. And No, if you are not a beginner blogger!

If you have blog for months or years by using the old permalinks format, all your old inter links will be stay as it is. With your new permalinks format, your readers might not be able to access your old post. With Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings!

By using this plugin, it using a technique called “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect. It tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permenantly moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one. When you do this, search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank. You also continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed.

Permalinks Migration Plugin installation guide:

1. Download Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin
2. Unzip and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Activate it on your wordpress Admin Panel -> Plugin page.
4. Goto admin panel -> Options-> Permalinks Migration, set the old permanlink structure of your site. For example in my case is “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/“
5. Goto admin panel -> Options -> Permalinks, put in the new permalink structure to what you want and click on Update Options. For me, I’ve choose “/%postname%/”

My two cents

After install this plugin into my wordpress, it works perfectly for me! For example, I’ve an old post about Microsoft Live Writer which point to old permalinks format (with Year, Month, Day).

But now when you click on this old permalinks format (http://ahtim.com/2007/09/23/blogging-with-microsoft-live-writer/), it automatic redirect you to my new permalinks format which do not have year, month and day (http://ahtim.com/blogging-with-microsoft-live-writer/).