If I change permalinks I get a 404

  • Hi
    I am stuck with permalinks as Page IDs, which is not good seo for google.
    I wonder if anyone knows why – when I switch permalinks to postname, the links turn to 404s not found.
    Originally when I built my site, https://www.hospitalhomecareproducts.org.nz, I could not get postname working then, so I gave up and built the whole site with page id links.
    I thought I would try to build the site afresh, new install, and then imported an exported xml copy from main site. I have made a start here: https://webdesinz.com/homecare/ and I have set the permalinks to postname, and the links from menus are working, its just the middle of pages I have manually entered hyperlinks which were imported, and they have all the wrong links. I can assume I could change those links manually… no need to do this really, as its the main site I want the changes to postname, the permalinks cant find anything but page id?
    Thanks
    G

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Marius L. J.

    (@clorith)

    Hi,

    Any link manually entered into a post won’t be changed by WordPress when you change the Permalink structure of your site, these will have to be manually edited I’m afraid.

    Thread Starter webdesinz

    (@webdesinz)

    thank you Marius! My only remaining question is should I really change the links, given how google treat changed URLs in their index. What is worse; keeping poor pageIDs, and a built up ranking – or changing to postname and losing page rank on google? On one hand, my Yoast plugin says I should change to postname….
    I know I could add 301 redirects, (if I do decide to change permalinks), but in the past, anyone changes links, loses page ranking even though there are redirects. They never seem to get back their original levels. Maybe only temporary hit on rank, and it would bounce back even better, with the postnames in place?

    Moderator Marius L. J.

    (@clorith)

    SEO really isn’t my strong suit, but Yoast (whom has a team of awesome SEO people) have quite a few articles on the matter, and they all recommend just changing it and redirecting (301 means a permanent redirect and Google won’t penalize you for changing the structure if you redirect properly).

    You could have a look at some of their articles on the matter such as:
    – https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/
    – https://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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