Permalink Migration Plugin – Great Plugin For SEO
Everton | Feb 20, 2007 | Comments 16
I was debating with Ajay this morning the merits of having a co.uk or a .com domain and whether having a .com address would result in better placement by Google. I’m still not sure what’s best, but Ajay prompted me to make what is probably the most important change to my blog I’ve made in a long time to improve my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which was to create user-friendly permalinks for my articles.
Before I started using WordPress back in June 2006 I had been using Blogware. I managed to create a huge number of ReWrite Rules in my .htaccess file so that around 95% of any external links to my old Blogware posts would point to my new WordPress urls. However, I couldn’t use friendly urls within WordPress as the convoluted process I’d used to create the Rewrite Rules wouldn’t work.
Luckily Ajay told me about the Permalinks Migration Plugin that allows you to safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings. It does this by doing the redirecting within WordPress, and it even sends a “301 Redirect”, or a Permanent Redirect to search engines to tell them to update their urls.
Installing it took 30 seconds, so now if someone clicks externally on one of my old blogware urls e.g. this one they will (i) get redirected via my .htaccess file to my old ugly WP url www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/652/ and then the Permalinks Migration Plugin will redirect it to the new shiny user-friendly url – http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/10-intermediate-ways-to-speed-up-windows/.
Hopefully going forwards by having my post titles in the urls not only will this entice more users to click on my links, but hopefully it will improve my search engine listings as engines still score a link based on whether any of the keywords appear in the url.
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This plugin has always worked well for me.
I’ve now got this plugin working on my site which is good….however I did spend a week or two just using manual 301 redirects in my .htaccess file for only my most popular pages = which has resulted in me losing all my Google rankings and now receive next to no traffic.
Does anyone have any idea if the use of this plugin will correct my rankings or otherwise how long might it take for my site to build back up to where it was?
This really wasn’t the kind of Christmas present I wanted!
Not sure, can anyone help Zath?
Part of the problem may well be that the manual updates on the .htaccess are now conflicting with the plugin so my thoughts are that you strip the .htaccess back to bare minimum, create and submit a new sitemap to Google. It could take 3-4 weeks for all the changes to filter through.
Thanks for replying guys. Mike – that was my first thought, so I removed all the manual redirects from my .htaccess and all my pages are now working properly and being forwarded by the plugin.
Didn’t think about the sitemap, but I also have a plugin for that – I’ve manually re-created that now and will see if it makes a difference.
The annoying thing for me, is that some of my popular pages have been re-indexed, but where I used to be in the top 5 for a keyphrase, am now nowhere – very frustrating, I just hope over time it comes back!
Annoyingly, the original permalink change went through with no problems on my test site, hence why I did it on my main site! Typical eh?
Cheers!
Thanks for posting this great SEO-Plugin!
It works very simple and it seems to make no failure. A very easy way to migrate old post-links.