If you are a rookie blogger like myself you may not even have any idea what a permalink is. When I set this blog up I figured it out because “permalinks” are in the options menu on Wordpress admin page. So, if you are like me you go through every option you have and you should notice permalink options as well. Basically, permalinks are how your post title shows in the URL bar. By default Wordpress has permalinks set like this:

http://therookieblogger.com/?p=123 (the “123″ is just a post ID).

or maybe you changed to this:

http://therookieblogger.com/archive/123

or even this:

http://therookieblogger.com/2007/11/23/sample-post/ (”sample post” being the title of your post)

I used to have my post set to the above setting because I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. These 3 examples would all be considered “naughty” permalink structures.

What does all this mean for a blog?

If you haven’t started a blog just yet, but you are strongly thinking about it I really suggest you change your permalink structure before you do any posting at all. It will make things a lot easier in the long run. Also, if you already have some post going and don’t want to change the structure because you think all the links you have built up in search engines and on other blogs will be broken this post is for you.

An example of a “nice” permalink for this post would be:

http://therookieblogger.com/permalinks-naughty-or-nice

Having “nice” permalink structures not only makes your posts easier for search engines - it makes the posts easier for users to read and find. I realized this thanks to Jacob Share. He made a comment on my contest post that it was hard to find it because of my “naughty” permalink structure. I decided I need to change now since it will be easier then waiting to do it.

How do you change from “naughty” to “nice” without messing everything up?

I already have about 25 or so posts going and one which has about 80 links to it (the $50 giveaway post). So, how do I change the structure while making sure I keep my link integrity in tact? Well, you could do 301 redirects for all your posts if you don’t have very many, but this would take up a lot of time. I found a nice little plugin called Dean’s Permalink Migration. This plugin is such a time saver if you haven’t set up “nice” permalinks when you first started your blog. Dean’s plugin does all the redirects for you. All you do is download and install the plugin into your Wordpress plugin folder, activate the plugin, and go under options. Now, under the options is a tab called “Permalinks Migration” - you need to make sure this is set to your “naughty” permalink structure:

After you verify the settings are correct under “Permalink Migration” go back to your Wordpress permalink settings. You can set this to anything you would like. I set mine to:

http://therookieblogger.com/%postname%/

If you have done everything correctly all your old “naughty” permalinks will be redirected to your brand new “nice” permalinks. A good way to check this is go to Google and do a search for one of your posts to make sure the link redirects to the correct place. Once again, if you haven’t started your blog yet I would set your permalinks to the “nice” structure before doing any posting! Doing this should be considered one of the more important steps to setting up a new blog.