I’ve had a couple of emails and a blog comment on my previous post WordPress setup, Themes and Plugins about changing the Permalinks.

Before I get into the permalinks I would like to mention a little about planning. You have a reason for starting a blog in the first place. It could be about something specific like SEO in WordPress or something more nebulous like make money online. Either way, I suggest that you take a large piece of paper and in the middle of it write your topic in a balloon. Around that, write topics that come to mind when you think of your topic.

In the make money online example, sub topics could be building traffic, Link building, Affiliate marketing etc. These are still broad topics. Then from each of these, you do the same exercise, writing topics around them.

In this simple example, the first set of topics are your categories, all other topics below them can then be your tags. This will do a couple of things for you. With this kind of planning:

• It reduces the need for changing your categories.
• It gives you a ready made set of topics to write about.
• It gives your blog direction and focus.

This isn’t to say that you can never change the direction of your blog, but if you do it will not be because you didn’t think about. When you set up your blog, you configure the Permalinks to use categories and post titles, not the date. This makes the URLs a lot more SEO friendly and useful.

Changing Permalinks

If you change your Permalinks after you have started posting then two things will happen:

• Your posts will "disappear", they will still be there but you and your visitors cannot access them.
• The search engines will not be able to find them, you will get an Error 404 - Not Found message. To fix this you need to create a 301 Redirect for each page.

An Example

Say you have a page at
http://site.com/2007/10/10/my-great-post/
You change the permalink so that the category was used instead of the date, this gives:
http://site.com/goodstuff/my-great-post/
The 301 Redirect springs into action every time a request is made for:
http://site.com/2007/10/10/my-great-post/
and redirects the visitor to:
http://site.com/goodstuff/my-great-post/

Solutions

If you are using WordPress there is an easy solution, the Permalinks Migration Plugin. This will create the 301 Redirects for you.

If you you are using Blogger then you will need access to your .htaccess file.

What is the .htaccess file?

When a request is made for a page your web server first looks for this file. It contains instructions regarding security, errors, redirects etc. You can create or edit it with any text editor and you will find it in the home or root directory of your web server.

Adding the Redirect

The syntax for adding a redirect is:
redirect 301 /oldpath/oldfile.htm http://yoursite.com/newpath/newfile.htm
where:
/oldpath/oldfile.htm is where the page was originally found.
http://yoursite.com/newpath/newfile.htm is the new full path to the page.

So to change:
http://site.com/2007/10/10/my-great-post.htm
to:
http://site.com/goodstuff/my-great-post.htm
You would use:
redirect 301 /2007/10/10/my-great-post.htm http://site.com/goodstuff/my-great-post.htm

You would do this for each post and it should be sufficient if you have only a handful of posts.

As you can see, when you change your Permalinks, it causes more work for your web server and introduces a slight delay before the page is displayed. With a little forethought and planning, you can avoid this.