Blog Azeroth

When you set up your WordPress blog, one of the settings is about Permalinks.

Permalinks are the unique referrer of each individual post. By default, it will use a numeric structure like this: http://altitis.treehuggers.info/?p=123

It is highly recommended to switch to something else, specifically an option which has your post name in it.

Two reasons:

1: Search Engine Indexation. Your permalink appears in search results. Explicit naming instead of numbers will help searchers to determine that your post may provide what they are searching for

2: Trackbacks / Linking: Let's assume you write a terrific post and other bloggers link to that post in stuff they write about you. Now let's further assume you move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress. When you import your WordPress.com posts, it is not necessarily guaranteed that the numbering will remain the same.

So when the linking blogs do some cleanup and maintenance, and want to update their own old posts so that they link to your terrific post on your new self-hosted WordPress blog, having a name (and a date for instance) as a permalink is a lot easier to fix than going through your archives and trying to remember which one of your great posts was linked initially.

This just happened to me. Took about 20 minutes to find out that an old post #102 had become #123 on a certain now self-hosted priest blog.

Please consider using explicit permalinks, whoever cites you may be grateful at some point in the future.

*grumble*

When I first started blogging with the free hosting on wordpress.com, I had it set so that all my permalinks had the post names in them.

Then I got my blog hosted on a webhosting service so I could customize my blog to my liking and be able to edit css and use plug-ins and so forth.

But when I switched everything over, I forgot to change the settings on my permalinks to show posts names, and ended up with the numbers. I didn't realize this until way later.

So my question to you is, if I changed my setting now to show post names in the Permalinks, will it automatically change all my old posts also? Or will it only affect new posts from then on? And also, how would it affect the links people already used to link to some of my posts?

Your old posts should change. I don't think people's links do. I'm not sure if it will automatically redirect.

I made the switch last night, and everything went smoothly. Also people's links STILL WORKS. So that is a good thing to know for anyone who is thinking about switching over.

Usually, upon clicking an "outdated", or "ugly", link from another blog, when the user loads your site, WP will do the work automatically and refresh the URL to the "new", "pretty", one.

However, if this becomes an issue, I believe I've seen some plugins on the WP site that will facilitate such a thing for you automatically. Though, of course, I didn't think to bookmark any of them. A quick Google search for WP plugins relating to "pretty" permalinks should turn up something useful, though.

Basically, it just means that old links that still point to posts using the ?=# format will still work, and redirect automatically to the new URL for the page/post, one way or another, so folks don't have to go back and comb archives to fix broken links, regardless of where the link comes from (either on your blog, or someone else's).

Permalinks Moved Permanently is the plugin that I use for the purpose Lassirra describes above. Simply install and it should handle the redirection for you automatically.

With WP 2.5 and above the old "slugs" will redirect to the new permalinks. Also I recommend the http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ plugin for greater visibility among the search engines.