Very useful post for people. Changing permalinks to more seo friendly ones is very lucrative. I can tell you as an affiliate marketer I've made very good money just off seo traffic, and a big part of that is having the right permalink.
Super Affiliate
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For a website owner who knows anything about search engine optimization, one of the scariest things in the world is changing the URL structure. Not only do you need to make sure the pages work on the new URLS, bu you have to make sure that all of your old urls properly redirect to the new ones.
One mistake can cost you all existing incoming links and any search engine rankings. Not something to be taken lightly.
But I took the leap today here on Jangro.com and here's how and why I did it.
Way back when I set up this blog, I chose poorly when setting up my permalink structure. My old url format was:
/a/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/I don't even remember why I put that 'a' in there at the beginning. I guess maybe I shortened the wordpress example of having /archive/ at the beginning. I've dreaded this decision for years now as I wanted to have a cleaner structure.
Today I switched to a simpler, more keyword rich, structure:
/%category%/%postname%/and I hope with some good category names and post titles, I'll get some improved traffic to the pages on which I look for natural search rankings.
For example, this URL
http://www.jangro.com/a/2006/08/03/how-to-change-your-samsung-dlp-lamp-in-5-minutes/
is now
http://www.jangro.com/electronics/dlp-tv/how-to-change-your-samsung-dlp-lamp-in-5-minutes/
When switching to a category/postname based permalink structure, you need to be careful of a few things. First, make sure all your posts are categorized. And second, make sure if your posts are in multiple categories, the one you want is lower in the sort order of their IDs. The latter can be difficult, so it may be easier to just put posts in a single category. I went through 30 pages of posts to clean this up.
Also, before changing the permalink format, I made sure I had the redirects in place. This is very easy with a plugin called Dean's Permalinks Migration. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I do know that wordpress posts have their permalink stored in them. So this plugin must detect a page not found, then go looking for the old permalink in the post table.
I also tested it in conjunction with the very popular "Redirections" plugin and it seems to be working great.
I'm optimistic that with some good 301 redirects in place this change will have only positive effects.