SEO Tomfoolery

[Southwesttim]

Oh Hai,

I recently changed the permalink structure on my Wordpress based site, southwestbreaks.co.uk from the standard ?p=123 to a more SEO chummy /%postname%/. As a result, my site has completely dropped off the board for all my previously well ranked search phrases.

Having since gotten into SEOmoz a bit more, I can see there are WP plugins available that apparently would've done this a lot more smoothly.

I'd be most grateful if someone could explain if this drop off is just temporary, or have I somehow entered Google's shun book? The site has been like this for about 48 hours.

Thanks,

Tim

[Southwesttim]

Thanks for the quick responses.

Currently, visiting a page on my site using the old permalink structure redirects one to the same page on the new setup, so I'm guessing there is a redirect in place, all be it a 302? (all I did was change the structure in the permalinks tab on WP, nothing else).

Should I still do what you suggest with the htaccess file?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Tim,

hmmm..that is a quick response from Google!

I suspect your problem is that you have unintentionally broken all of the indexed links in the google search results- Ouch! ...and any external links to posts from other sites - Ouch again!!

Basically, Google has the URL of your pages indexed, but you have changed all of the URL's without creating a 301 (permanent) redirect. So, when a user clicks that link in the Search Results page it returns a 404 Not found error.

Ah..I see that Dan has explained what you need to do to fix the problem.

Sha

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Did you 301 Redirect the old pages to the matching new pages?  Anytime you change URLs you have to do this, it redirects your link juice as well as anyone trying to access an old page with a link or bookmark - they'll arrive at the new page instead of getting a 404 (page not found).

You do 301 redirects in your .htaccess file (insert them after the wordpress info) in this format;

Redirect 301 /oldpage/  http://www.mydomain.com/newpage/

One line for every page you're redirecting.  If you are using the new Yoast WP SEO plugin, you can edit your .htaccess file directly from WordPress, otherwise you have to edit it via FTP

BONUS: An easy way to get your old and new URLs so you do not have to type them all out, is run something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth on your site, and export the URLs into excel.

-Dan