redirect Page permalinks

[tjd]

HI, I'm at the point where I're renamed several site Pages and the permalinks now need to be changed or I get 404 delivered. I've read that a 301 redirect plugin would work best, any ideas how to proceed or recommendations on a plug-in would be appreciated. Thanx...Happy Holidays.

[Anita]

How many pages do you need to redirect?

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Love coffee, chocolate and my Bella!

[tjd]

Hi anitac,

I'm attempting, without much luck it seems , to redirect about 5-6 Pages to the same Pages but with new names. I've been working with a WP Plugin and it just doesn't seem to be working for me. About a half-hour ago I opened up a page from Dashboard and got a white screen with a message: Example Domaine from http://www.iana.org. I haven't a clue?? Anyway the information is there but when I choose that page from the Nav Menu I get that Message and I'm totally clueless.

I thought changing the Permalinks would be a breeze but not so. Part of the confusion is that yesterday I installed both W3 Cache & Yoast SEO which for me was a bit demanding and so there is a little confusion goin on. Yoast sez for good SEO I need to reconfigure my URL's and so there you are. Thanx for asking....ideas??

BTW my website:  tomjdolan.com

[Anita]

Would this work. Since you only have 5-6 pages to redirect, there is this plugin I use called Page Links To - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/. You install it, then go to each of the 5-6 pages, and add the URL that you want that page pointed to. I think since you don't have very many this might work for you.

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Love coffee, chocolate and my Bella!

[tjd]

Hello,

I did figure a fix for my particular issue but I've bookmarked the plug-in for future reference. Thanx for taking the time to offer your suggestions.

Happy New Year, once more,

Tom

[memeLab]

Yoast's SEO plugin has a redirect built in, but I'd recommend using Urban Giraffe's Redirection plugin.  once activated, it will monitor changes to the post permalink and automatically create a redirect for you.  You can manually add simple redirects, or use regex if you're game 🙂

It does everything but make toast!

[tjd]

Thanx for that recommendation re: Urban Giraffe. I only installed Yoast recently and wasn't aware of the re-direct feature at first. I did discover it later but in trying to use it, I never saw that anything was affected. Frankly, prior to this site-building, I thought I could simply 'edit' the permalinks  at the top of each Page, but ran into trouble with the one Page. My solution to that, was to trash that Page and re-build it with the new permalink and it works fine. One question I have is, where is the code-information stored? Can I look at it? As I can't touch Genesis, I'm wondering how I can tell the re-direct works. I probably should read a 'Guide to Permalinks for the Code-challenged'.

Happy New Year!

[RickD]

To determine if your redirect is actually sending the proper 301 status code, you can download the "Live HTTP Headers" add-on for FireFox. You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/

Once installed, type in your old url and you should see the browser get redirected to your new URL. Then take a look in Live HTTP Header for the message HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently. Any other redirect status code could have a negative impact on your search rankings.

-rd

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-Rick R. Duncan

[memeLab]

my understanding is that you can just edit the permalink as you have done, with a few caveats:

beware duplicate slugs
beware changing links which have already accrued link juice

A quick intro to permalinks: all requests to WordPress are actually funnelled through http://www.your-site.com/your-wp-directory/index.php, which then implements the redirects using php. (It can otherwise be done earlier in htaccess). WordPress stores all the permalinks that it creates in the database table wp_posts in the column 'post_name'.

WP won't create a duplicate name, so if you put  /home in the trash (not emptied), then try to recreate it, you'll get /home-2.

Changing the slugs can be bad for your ranking, because you may have accumulated link juice at /my-popular-post and if you change that to /my -really-popular-post then when you get reindexed, Google will receive a 404 not found at your valuable address, and you lose the juice.  This is why the Redirection plugin is useful - when Google visits, it will be informed that your valuable page is still viable, but has moved permanently to the new URL by a 301 response.

To address your original issue:

install redirection,
Tools>Redirection>Redirects, add new redirection:

Source = /my-old-slug
Target = /my-new-slug

Going forward:

ensure that under tools>redirection>options: URL Monitoring is set to 'Modified Posts' and 'monitor new posts'
edit your post permalink (if a number is appended to you chosen permalink, there is a duplicate)
Redirection will automatically add a redirect (see it under Redirection>Groups>modified posts)

Best wishes, Tim

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