AndhySukma.com

Change Permalink in WordPress

Before writing about how to change Permalink in WordPress, i think we should know what permalink is.
So what is Permalink?

According to wikipedia, permalink or permanent link is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Based on that definition, we can identify that permalink must be consistent in order to avoid broken link. Consistent means that we shouldn’t change permalink often as it will impact to broken link for someone who link the permalink in their website or blog. Furthermore, it will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid, so we are losing visitors from other sites or bookmarks that links to our blog.

Anyway, if we want to change our permalink blog without worrying about broken link we should use Permanent Redirect “301 Redirect”. Permanent Redirect is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs by telling the search engines whether the page has permanently moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one. If a blog use Permanent Redirect, search engines will update their indexes quickly and we won’t lose our pagerank. We will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.

WordPress now has this kind of permanent redirect plugin called “Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin Version 1.0“. By using this plugin, i can change my permalink into the new ones without worrying about broken link and lose my pagerank.That day, i changed my permalink from format /note/%post_id%/ into format /%postname%/ in order to make my permalink more readable both for search engine and human. After changed my permalink, I checked my link page on several website and found that everything is fine. So i recommend this plugin if you need to change your permalink format.