Changing Permalink Structure, will it hurt SEO?

  • xiel

    (@xiel)


    5 years, 4 months ago

    Hi. I manually customed my permalinks on all pages and posts and the result is, the link previews when sharing to social media sites displays the meta image incorrectly.

    Current permalink structure is set to sitename.com/postname
    But, I add the /blog before the postname so it looks like this:
    sitename.com/blog/postname which is why the meta images on link preview does not display correctly. Blog is my main category so I thought it was okay adding this but I did not know I can just change the permalink structure and tick “Blog” as my category to display it.

    I want to correct these by setting up the proper permalink structure that I want which is sitename.com/blog/postname but I’m worried that it might affect my SEO. Since after setting up the new permalink structure, the URLS will be sitename.com/blog/blog/postname so I would need to clean up all the excess

    My question, can I just change my permalink settings while the site is live or do I have to put it in Maintenance mode, then change the permalink settings? Will google crawl the site while it’s in maintenance mode? How do I properly transition the changes in the permalink structure? Do I need to redirect all posts and pages?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • fullworks

    (@fullworks)

    5 years, 4 months ago

    My question, can I just change my permalink settings while the site is live

    yes

    Will google crawl the site while it’s in maintenance mode?

    Depends how, WP doesn’t have a user enable maintenance mode feature, most people use a plugin and the settings will control bots.

    Do I need to redirect all posts and pages?

    Depends if there is any real SEO value. If you have a lot of inbound links for instance then you will want to do this very carefully.

    checkpoint71

    (@checkpoint71)

    5 years, 4 months ago

    – You can do it live – the change will be done in seconds
    – Redirects are needed if you dont want to loose the state of the old links. If you change the permalink without redirect google will notice it as new sites and the old links as lost sites.
    – If you haven´t done yet – give google the sitemap at search console. There you can see the progress – it will take time. Notice that there are two different states: Google have noticed the chance (read the sitemap) and Google do indexes of the sites (this can take days or weeks till it is complete).

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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