Skillett.com

If you can see this, all has gone well – if you can’t I’m probably talking to myself (nothing unusual there!!).

My current permalink structure has not sat well with me for the last year or so, it’s kind of thrown together and doesn’t look particularly nice… I’ve been itching to change it, but never dared (after all this blog has a reasonable PageRank and gets a decent amount of traffic!). The time has come to bite the bullet.

I know what you’re saying:

“Just go ahead – change the damned things – why should we care?”

Well it’s not quite that simple, changing them has a few knock on effects:

  1. All my internal links to older posts referencing them will be broken.
  2. All links by other people to my older posts will be broken (this is really bad in my opinion as I can’t contact them all to fix them!).
  3. The search engines probably won’t like me much any more (and I quite like them, so this is also quite bad!).

Solutions

Well I put out my request on Twitter and got all of two responses (and one retweet), the first didn’t understand the question at all and suggested I just change them and install All-in-one SEO. The second was more useful and suggested the Platinum SEO plugin (my concern with this is how it might react with my already install All-in-one SEO).

This really leaves me with the Permalink Redirect plugin which sounds like it might do exactly what I want through 301 redirects. I’ve heard good things about Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration plugin, so I think we’ll give that one a go!

Well it seems to have worked – but I’m convinced that the databae should be updated – that would make more sense to me than a permanent 301 redirect… Is that possible?