Change category structure on existing wordpress

  • When I started my wordpress website I created categories and subcategories like

    
 - Cars
     - News
     - Shows
     - Conferences
 - Phones
     - News
     - Shows
     - Conferences

    etc

    A news article about phones would have the URL

    – domain.com/phones/news-phones/slug

    while a news article about cars would be

    – domain.com/cars/news-cars/slug

    I find this bad, now, after I have 300 articles. Both from a SEO point of view as well as sorting, displaying categories on the website etc.

    I am thinking of doing something like

    
– Cars
– Phones
– News
– Shows
– Conferences

    And set 2 categories for an article, where one of them is set to primary.

    1st question I have: Is there a way to change the permalinks so that the old article on URL domain.com/cars/news-cars/slug will be 301’ed to the new URL.
    Generally, the old URLs are just lost and accessing them would do a 404.

    2nd question: is there a better way to create categories so that all articles would looks like

    
domain.com/cars/news/slug
domain.com/games/news/slug
domain.com/phones/news/slug
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  • Although I’m not an SEO guru, I would say keep the existing structure you have as it logically makes more sense. The problem with changing it after you have 300+ articles in the related categories will all result in 404’s (error not found) in Google if they have all been indexed.

    The only way around that is to do permanent 301 redirects if you do make the changes you are considering. But will have to be done in your site’s HTACCESS file, which might be best to look for a good redirect plugin that has a proven track record and reviews. Also check out this article from Yoast (which has a plugin).

    Hard to say how you should have your category structure because I don’t know what your site is about, what type of articles, and based on your article subject matter, if sub-categories are needed, for example: news, like you show in your last example, but just have 1 level categories with your articles posted to the relative category.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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