Regular readers will know that I’ve switched from my old /post-ID/post-name/ permalink structure to the more SEO-friendly /category/post-name/ permalink structure a few weeks back. (Blog Permalink Structure Optimization and Bringing Hordes of Traffic Over)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a SEM) to figure out that www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/blogging/wordpress-optimization is going to be a heck of a lot easier both for humans and search engines, compared to www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/573/wordpress-optimization.

Besides the richer keyword dense URL, your blog visitors will have an idea what category your post falls into, especially if you have a (fairly) tightly-themed blog (I’m doing my best to focus on blogging/affiliate marketing/social traffic generation).

To counter the potential loss of 300+ indexed pages in the search engines, I’d spent quite a significant amount of time on a 301 Redirect page, manually keying in cryptic redirects like:

Redirect /101/exclusive-99-internet-marketing-giveway-including-robert-allen-book/ http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/internet-marketing/exclusive-99-internet-marketing-giveway-including-robert-allen-book/
(And repeating that another 299 times).

But then again, having gone on a roll in the last couple of months, the prospect of losing traffic wasn’t a pleasant prospect.

Providence wasn’t far, however. Continue reading →