I change my permalinks after a few months, will it ruin my SEO?

[Kimi]

I have a new blog which is about 4 months old, and i changed my permalinks today which i should did from the beginning. Will it ruin my SEO? because i notice some of my visitors are coming from google, and if now other visitors coming from google, my posts are not found. Or will it be updated by google? bear with me, i am a newbies

[danlefree]

The idea behind a permanent link is that it will not change... if you have the time to create redirects to the new URI's, I'd recommend doing so - otherwise chalk this one up to "learning experience" and avoid similar changes in the future.

[Kimi]

Hey danlefree,

Thanks for your respond. I reckon my visitor from google will land in my "nothing found article.." so i put a note in my front page that the posts are still there and they can go to my sitemap to find it, i hope it will work.

[digital29]

Hey danlefree,

Thanks for your respond. I reckon my visitor from google will land in my "nothing found article.." so i put a note in my front page that the posts are still there and they can go to my sitemap to find it, i hope it will work.

Install a plugin called Redirection...the posts will work, although you will still loose some SEO points

[namebutler]

If your current permalinks do NOT include any keywords with ever post I would take the short term hit. Install the all-in-one plug in and start using it to help your website long term.

[ronniethedodger]

Install a plugin called Redirection...the posts will work, although you will still loose some SEO points

The plugin is a good idea, but I doubt there are any so-called "points" to be lost. The blog is only 4 months old and has literally no value right now (point-wise speaking).

[Optic]

If you really need to change your permalinks, use Dean's Permalink Migration plugin. It will make sure they are redirected for you.

Letting links 404 is really bad. I'd take the time to go in and redirect them.

Anyone can do a redirect. Just go into your .htaccess file, and add something like this for each post that is getting a 404 error.

Redirect 301 /old-url/ http://yourdomain.com/new-url/

There are many ways to do it, you can make rewrite rules using regex to handle alot of them, but this will do the job

[kgun]

Letting links 404 is really bad. I'd take the time to go in and redirect them.

Hopefully (s)he does not delete a 404 error not found page.

If you spell an URL wrong or write something meaningless, it is very good to have a 404 error page on every site.

[Ravenhawk]

Yes changing your permalink setting will cause all your links to break and of course affect your SEO.. If you have to change permalink settings then you need to tun a redirection plugin to catch any stranglers heading to posts and help keep your SEO intact.

[Optic]

Dean's Permalink Migration Plugin is pretty handy for this as well.