Hey bloggers, yesterday I found an excellent plugin for wordpress. This time is the turn of the Permalinks Migration Plugin, which you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.
As you may know, the default permalinks structure of wordpress is /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/, something which is not the best for search engines…
As I comment in my preview post Setting Up Permalinks On Wordpress For SEO Success, the best structure is /%postname%/ because the search engines will find quickest the slug or name of your posts, which generally is the title of the post.
In my preview post, some people recommended to add an .html, .htm or .php extension at the end of the postname. That’s because a permalink ended on slash will be a directory and the permalink ended on an extension will be a file, and that could be misunderstood by non-advanced search engines. However, I decided to change my permalinks structure to /%postname%/, and just a plugin could make it possible.
How The Plugin Works?
There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permanently moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one. It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect. When you do this, search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank. You will continue receiving traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.
By installing this plugin, you can change the permalinks structure without losing traffic because when an user or spider visit your site through an old permalink, the plugin will redirect them to the new permalink of the same post.
Download Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin
Installation
- unzip and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Activate it on your Admin Panel->Plugin Management page.
Usage
- goto admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permanlink structure of your site.
- goto admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want.
- Done,enjoy it.
Conclusion
If you want to optimize your blog for search engines, you can use this plugin to change that without losing your traffic or ranks!
Download Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin
Hi! My name is Javier but everybody calls me Javo. I am partial-time blogger and I'm specialized in Blogging and Internet Marketing tips. Here you can find tips to make money online ... 
Great tip. Thanks for this. I may have to check this out. I love learning about new WP plugins.
Lisa Irbys last blog post..Create Amazing e-Book Covers for Free
Nice Tip man. Benn looking for this plugin. Thanks.
This is a great plugin for whoever needing to change the permalink structuire of the blog. I recommend /%postname%.html/ (which I am using) for the reasons listed here by Javo.
Why could I not have found this a few months ago?
A while back I needed to change my structure, and messed my entire blog up trying to do it. I did not understand the directions and created a huge mess.
Thanks for the link
This is what i’ve been searching for quite sometime. I’m using another plugin which is quite okay, but definitely i will try to use this plugin.
Why don’t you used .html extension to your permalinks? Most of the big bloggers recommends it. Do you have any reason not to change it? Care to Share with us, buddy..?
The first thing I do when starting a new blog is change the permalink structure to just include post names. That way I never have to restructure if I change a category or something.
Zens last blog post..80 Things That Make Me Happy
@Moolahking I have not a special reason to use an extension in my permanent links, they have not convinced me
. I’m not an expert on SEO, but if probloggers like Maki or Chow don’t use an extension, it might be for something… Someone can look for an SEO expert? We need one!
You rock! I just changed the directory structure on one of my sites, and needed a plugin just like this. Everything works just as advertised. Thanks again!
Zander Chances last blog post..Search Engine Strategies 2008 - San Jose