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I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 14 years 10 months 27 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]

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