At start of this month I made a change to this blog. I changed its existing domain http://thewordpresspro.net to http://crunchpress.com by setting up a 301 redirect.

The Permalink structure previously was year/month/day/post-name
I do not like this structure so changed it to domain.com/post-name

Now here is an interesting situation, thewordpresspro.net/09/10/17/post-name redirects to crunchpress.com/09/10/17/post-name and this page further to crunchpress.com/post-name

It become a double 301 redirect. When I analyzed it I become afraid of situation that this may cause problem in indexing.

After some research I cam across this page, at Google group a Google employ Berghausen has responded to a similar question. According to him Google indexes and support “double 301 redirects” however Google is slow on indexing these redirects.

So if you are in a similar situation i.e, changing your WordPress hosted sites domain and then Permalink structure, don’t worry, go ahead!

As some of our readers may have noticed that we have changed URL structure at CrunchPress.com I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. However I discovered if a random visitor from a search engine knows that the post they are loading is old, they are more likely to close the page quickly. Even some bloggers have started taking off dates from their blog posts.

It was a bit scary for me to change URLs due to SEO problems (I’m already having a problem with Google at the time of writing this post, more on it later). However changing URL proved very easy for me.

Here is the process,

1. Go to settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.
Here in ‘Custom Structure’ field enter, /%postname%/

2. Now open up your favorite FTP program, longin to FTP account of your WordPress install, open .htaccess to edit and enter following code.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +MultiViews
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://crunchpress.com/$1

RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Change CrunchPress.com with your domain, save .htaccess and you are done!

I’ve assumed you are using domain/year/month/day/post-name structure, if your structure is different please tweak it accordingly.

NOTE:
1. If you are using Super-Cache or any other cache plugin for WordPress, please clear your cache before doing this procedure.
2. If you have a sitemap plugin installed, update/rebuild your sitemap manually.
3. 6) Add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure that the sitemap was accepted and keep an eye on crawl errors periodically.