Changing Permalink Setting

Hey kmcminn!

I think you should be good to go. The big concern with permalinks is that the category and postname are relative to search terms you’d like search engine to index.

Quick question though, as I see you wrote the year and month as 2013 and 10. Did you do that or did you use the actual tags to denote the month and year?

The actual tag structure would be

../%category%/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%

For more info see: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Permalinks

Hope that helps!

Ninja vanish!

Hello, ImageOmega. Thanks for such a quick response. i appreciate that.

As far as the year and month go, I’m providing exactly what I see in the permalink settings options.

View post on imgur.com

So, now what? Which is correct?

Oh sheesh, never mind. I see what you’re saying now! LOL

OK, so if I DO change it to what you suggested, I won’t receive and 404 pages or penalties?

You shouldn’t. Easy way to test is to draft up a post and from your front page or wherever your posts are going click on its header. If it takes you to a single page displaying your post you are good to go!

Ninja vanish!

Hmm…that sounds like a good idea. Could you please give me an example?

Oh, I just mean to go into your WordPress dashboard and click Post –> Add New. Fill in a header and some filler text then hit Publish.

Now view the post on your page and see if when you click on the header text if it takes you to a working page.

Hope that clarifies!

Ninja vanish!

Would that require me to change the permalink setting first?

Oh, yes! This is what I meant…Go ahead and change the permalink structure to the custom one I posted above (minus the ..) and then create a new post.

Alright, so I changed the permalink setting to:

../%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

…dumped the cache from WordPress and the Browser, reloaded the page and all the linked look perfectly fine.

IF I try to access a page that had the previous link structure, it automatically gets redirected to the new URL structure of ../%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

So, everything seems to be working great. Now, doing something like that isn’t going to incur any penalties from Google?

It shouldn’t.

Google penalizes sites for having deceptive or redundant links. All you’re doing here is structuring your URL’s so that they are friendly and organized for your readers. You should be good to go.

Glad I could help!

Ninja vanish!

Thanks very much for all your help, ImageOmega.

One question regarding the share links for each article (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). All the sharing activity for those, the “numbers,” have all been reset to zero. I understand that, though because the URL structure changed.

BUT, is there a way to get that info back, or somehow change the coding to take that into account so it doesn’t look like I have absolutely zero activity for my articles?

Yeah, I think that is an unfortunate side effect.

Here is a helpful article I found that discusses a possible solution using his “Generate Redirects” tool. You’ll see the button under the last heading “Changing WordPress Permalink Structure”. This stuff may be daunting though as it involves you accessing the .htaccess file that is in your root install directory.

Excellent. Did you mean to post an article, though? ??