Earlier I used date and name permalink structure for my blogs. Recently I got information about SEO URL tricks and I made decision to change permalink structure to Post name.
wordpress change permalink day and name to post name without losing traffic
So I changed permalink from:
http://wordpressapi.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
to:
http://wordpressapi.com/%postname%/
It was very simple to above changes through wp admin->settings->permalink.
But with this produced many issues. Like google search result will go to old site URLs and My blog links are posted on other multiple blogs. That links will be broken and redirect to 404. Also I interlinked my other posts with other posts. They will go to 404 page.
If your blog pages will not found then google site ranking will go down.
By default in wordpress links look like /index.php?p=1234 which are not very useful for visitors or search engines.
In this walkthrough we’ll guide you through changing that to something useful like /post-title/.
Here I will tell you without loosing trafic or SEO how can you change the wordpress permalink day and name to post name
First go to wp admin->settings->permalink section and change setting to post name
If you are using any caching plugin (w3-cache or wp super chache) then remove all cache from dashboard.
Last edit .htaccess file and put following code there. Change domain name to your site name.
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9-/]+) http://digcms.com/$1
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
When would you want to use the other permalink settings?
- If you’re a news site, the Day and name or Month and name option lets visitors know when the content was published.
- Google News requires you to have a minimum of 3 numbers in your article URLs. The date-based options achieve this.
- If you have a lot of content on your website covering a wide range of topics, using categories in the URL can provide context. For example, /shows/big-bang-theory/ and /science/big-bang-theory/ are two very different things. This works best when you choose only 1 category for your posts.
Useful article
http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/
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