Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 15 years 13 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302’s.
Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.
In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).
I’ve written about WP hurting search rankings before, and while changing the LAST part of a permalink does now seem to 301 correctly, in this case, changing the permalink of a parent page causes a 302 temporary redirect of all the child pages.
This, of course, kills your PageRank and effectively removes any inbound link equity that those pages may have obtained. Nice, huh?
*Update 12/15 – We are now using this redirection plugin on all new or upgraded WP installations until they fix it…
[flash http://www.pdxtc.com/vids/wp-302-still/wp-302-still.flv]
