Why to stick on to your existing website URL permalink structure

You might have seen many websites URL structure, they start with the website name followed by sub names/folder like structure. Most of their website/ blog article URLs remain the same except for the last one or 2 parts like the URL might contain a category or headline or some unique number. As you can see in this post, my website URL permalink structure looks something like:

http://howtotechguru.com /%postname% /%post_id%

This is not one of the default permalink structures and is custom-made by me. There are different valid permalink structures that are allowed in Wordpress or any other website. In addition to these you can have your own custom website URL permalink structure like how I did. For more details on this check out Wordpress's Using Permalinks. See that your website URL is not too long.

Also see: How to handle reappearing of fixed crawl errors

Let me tell you what went wrong with mine. I have multiple categories in my blog and each of my blog posts are assigned to one or more categories. I had my permalink structure in the same way - my domain name followed by category and then the post name and post ID. This worked fine initially and all my blog posts were indexed by Google. Later on for some reason, I decided to update my permalink structure and removed the category part in website URL permalink structure.  I did not have any issues for one or two days, but after that when I check my Google Webmasters there were few alerts which indicated crawl errors as shown below:

[caption id="attachment_3211" align="aligncenter" width="584"] Image: Google Webmasters[/caption]

The reason is Google has indexed webpages with the old website URL and any hits or visits to the old URL will now show response code - 404 webpage instead of content. There is no 'Internet' (category) used in the new URL or permalink structure.

Also see: How to fetch your Website as Google

Even though Google webmasters has detected this and your website has shown a 404 webpage instead of the actual content, you don't have to worry about Google's algorithm. Google will not penalize if there is a 404 webpage and is hence perfectly fine to have a 404 webpage. But this may not look good for your website visitors. There is a workaround for this, by using 301 redirect. So, redirect your old URL to new URL but before going any further don't forget to read some of the Important points to follow while redirecting webpages.

Also see: How to find broken links in your website

So, the next time you change your website URL to something new or changing the entire permalink structure think twice. Your old link might be shared every where and it's not nice for visitors to see 404 webpage. Also, don't forget to submit your new URL for indexing and remove old URL from Search Engine results.

You might be interested in reading: How to disallow crawling on certain parts of your website.

If you like this post then don’t forget to share it with your friends and follow us on Social Media or subscribe to our blog via email and be the first to get latest updates.