Comments on: Accumulate Link Equity by Shuffling Annual Reference Posts

By: » Blogging Tip: Don’t Use Dates in Your Permalink Structure @ jammer(six) «

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:44:04 +0000

[...] related to the republication point above, but it bears repeating. Jim over at Wangarific actually takes things a step further than I did, suggesting that you might want to have one “master” post for reference info [...]

By: Matt Jabs

Matt Jabs — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:47:03 +0000

Oh wow Mike, I thought I had already done that! Thank you for pointing it out.

I used the plugin you referenced and it worked like a charm. All internal links are now updated.

Thank you kindly.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:16:06 +0000

Matt, I’ll send you an email but you should change all your internal links to point to the new url. I notice you haven’t done that.

I haven’t used it myself but this plugin might help:

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/search-regex/

By: Matt Jabs

Matt Jabs — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:26:29 +0000

Many of you know, I also recently completed a successful move from /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ to /%postname%/

I tried using Deans perms plugin but ran into some complications, so I just used .htaccess.

Here is the code to use if you want to go this route: RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)(.*)?$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$3/ [R=301,L]

Although it was not painless, for me it is/was definitely worth it. Dated URLs pissed me off on so many fronts.

I decided to go with one post for annual ref posts. An example is my IRA contrib posts in which I just plan to update it w/the fresh content on the top of the page each year. http://www.debtfreeadventure.com/traditional-and-roth-ira-contribution-limits/

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:10:51 +0000

Ditto – thanks Fred.

I’m going to wait until Patrick tries it (successfully) on his flagship blog before I try it.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:41:49 +0000

Thanks for the info, Fred. I think I’ll try it on one of my minor sites before trying it on my flagship. Just in case!

By: Fred @ One Project Closer

Fred @ One Project Closer — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:20:41 +0000

I just read the threads between Peter and Patrick above… Just FYI that I have done a massive permalink redirect on our site successfully.

I went from a structure of /%category%/%postname%/ to just /%postname%/

I’m using Dean’s permalinks migration plugin and it worked flawlessly… All the incoming link juice moved to the new pages and google updated its indexes over the course of 0-4 weeks with no interruption in search traffic.

By: Fred @ One Project Closer

Fred @ One Project Closer — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:16:38 +0000

Jim – If you find yourself with a lot of link equity to one of the year posts and you want to push that link equity forward, you could do a 301 redirect from the dated page to the non-dated page, and then setup a new URL structure for the dated page. E.g., if you had “Best-Pick-up-Trucks-2009″ and you wanted to genericize it, you could 301 redirect that page to “Best-Pick-up-Trucks”, then create a new page at “2009-Best-Pick-up-Trucks” for the old information…

I find that some of us want to do the yearly posts because we’re seeing traffic from those posts and it is likely because we’ve gotten some good link equity into them.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:57:48 +0000

I have the same date problem.

Maybe just create pages for this type of post. Even though they aren’t published to your front page it shouldn’t really matter.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:22:15 +0000

If you do it correctly with a 301 redirect, it’ll be fine. You will have some short term fall in traffic, as Google and other search engines adjust, but it should be fixed fairly quickly (days or weeks, not months). I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble.