Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there a way of changing the Permalink without getting the 404 Error?
-
Hi, I am new to this all..
Is there a way of changing the permalink for example from:
domain/content/ to domain/profile/ without receiving the 404 error message. It's just that since my website has been developed, some pages and their content have changed but the permalink still shows the name of the old page which may be confusing.
Ps. Please use most simple language for explanations as I am really new to it.
Thank you!
Ve
-
Wow - looks like folks kinda missed the part where you asked to keep it simple, Ve
Because you site is built using WordPress software, it's actually simple and straightforward to do what you're asking. All it requires is the installation of a small plugin called "Redirection" to your website to automatically handle what needs to be done anytime you wish to change a page or post's permalink. (just to be sure - this is all assuming you're talking about changing the permalink right on the edit page for a post, not changing the permalink structure on the settings page for your whole blog)
In case you haven't installed plugins before, here's the step-by-step process. Don't be intimidated - it only looks long because I've made every step it's own bullet point for clarity
- log into your WordPress as if you were going to create a new post, but instead, look for the button called Plugins on the left sidebar
- hover your cursor over the Plugins button, and click on the Add New link that shows up
- on the new page, type Redirection into the search box and click the Search Plugins button beside it
- the plugin you want should be right at the top of the list - called Redirection (no other words) and in the description you'll see it is written by John Godley
- click the link for Install Now located under the name of the plugin
- you'll be taken to a page that tells you it's installing the plugin. (If WordPress gives you empty boxes to fill ion this new page, post back here. Depending on your site's configuration, sometimes WordPress needs a little help at this point.)
- Once WordPress has done it's thing, you should see a successful install notification on that page.
- click on the Activate Plugin link that now appears at the bottom of the "successfully installed" page you're on
- WordPress will again do it's thing and then take you to the page listing all your installed plugins. The plugin is now installed and activated!
- now go the post or page you want to change, and edit its permalink, republishing the post when you're done.
- go to your live site and click on one of the links to the page you just changed, to confirm that you end up on the correct new page at it's new address
- DONE! Go have a glass of wine (or other celebratory beverage.)
The background (if you want to know the "Why" as well as the "how")
When you change the permalink of a page in WordPress, you are changing its actual web address (also know as its URL). Even though you know you've done this, the rest of the web (and even your own website) don't know about the change so they're still looking for that page at it's old address.When your site's server gets a request to display that page, it can't find it so it sends back a 404 error, which basically says "there's no page at the address you're asking for and I have no idea where it might be".
To fix this, you need to teach the server where it should send everybody who's looking for the old address. You do this by writing what's called a 301 Redirect into the server so that when it gets a request for that old address, it can say "there's no page at that old address anymore - it's now moved permanently to this new address and I'm going to automatically send you there."
This all happens instantaneously in the background so the visitor never sees it - they just end up on the new address. In addition, this redirect tells the search engines to give the ranking value of the old address to the new address so it doesn't look like a brand new page starting from scratch. (helps keep your page showing up well in the search results)
The Redirection plugin automatically notices whenever you change the permalink of a page and automatically writes the code necessary to give the server the 301 redirect it needs, instead of you having to muck about with all the coding the other answers were talking about. YAY for WordPress! (Still, best to change the permalinks as seldom as possible though)
The method I gave you installs the plugin directly from the WordPress parent site , meaning they've checked and approved it so you know it's safe. The plugin can also do many other powerful things, but those are for another post
Do let me know if anything's not clearly-enough explained, or if you run into any problems
Good luck, and let us know how it goes!
Paul
-
Hi Ve, just as a further clarification, remember that when you use the 301 redirection you're passing that value to the new page although you lose something of that value (further reading here) that's why you should schoose wisely whenever perform a redirect or not.
In the case you need to do that consider that you won't be starting from 0 but not even from the same point you were with the other page which was ranking.
-
Thank you!
I didn't think there was sooo much work involved. I will look into it. Cause at the moment my site is ranking not badly, so making changes to my URL would mean losing those ranking positions and starting from new. It may be worth long term doing anyway, so I just have to see.
Thank you!
Ve
-
MissVe,
you can change your permalinks. You just need to set up 301 redirects from the old permalinks to the new. This not only forwards users to the new location but tells google that you've moved the page as well. This is the best way to handle your situation!
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:
- internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
- external. This may be trickier. There may be:
- external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
- Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.
So make all the internal and external possible fixes
change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools
and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.
For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.
Hope this is clear
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
GMB Bulk Upload Error
Hello! I am continuing to have issues with the bulk upload option.Currently, there are 12 non-verified locations in a location group in my GMB account. I have approximately 6-8 more that need to be added to this group via bulk upload. When uploading the spreadsheet, I receive an error reading "You've exceeded the limit for the about of locations you can upload to Google My Business in a single day. Try again later." It seems to happen specifically to the locations that aren't in my GMB account already. The others, the ones already in the account, are fine and simply read "No updates" when the bulk upload sheet is read. Everything else is marked as an error. Why is it marking some listings as nonviable when they come in via the bulk verification spreadsheet, which has been downloaded directly from the links Google has provided, and filled in with the help of the sample and amenities list?How do we finish uploading all of the remaining locations?I have another group, separate group (same company, groups split into US and International) under my name that may also need a bulk upload - what can I do to avoid this error in the future? Can they still be bulk uploaded to my account after I upload the first location group's listings?If you could provide any guidance, I'd be very grateful.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | kmarsh0 -
Getting rid of pagination - redirect all paginated pages or leave them to 404?
Hi all, We're currently in the process of updating our website and we've agreed that one of the things we want to do is get rid of all our pagination (currently used on the blog and product review areas) and instead implement load more on scroll. The question I have is... should we redirect all of the paginated pages and if so, where to? (My initial thoughts were either to the blog homepage or to the archive page) OR do we leave them to just 404? Bear in mind we have thousands of paginated pages 😕 Here's our blog area btw - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/blog Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia
Technical SEO | | tevag0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
404 Errors After Site Migration
Hello - I'm working on a website selling fashion accessories. The site just went through a site migration from Yahoo! to Big Commerce. Now we have a high level of warnings and errors from the crawl. Few are mentioning sites I never seen before on the Yahoo! platform. I also notice that the pages crawled has doubled. How can I fix or did I do something wrong with migration? I was running the website with minimal errors and now overwhelmed with errors all the error updates. If I can get some assistance on what could be wrong, I would greatly appreciate. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShopChameleon0 -
How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty
One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0