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

I’d checked out regular reader Ade Lamidi’s OnlineGist blog post Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress.

He’d used a WordPress plugin developed by China-based Dean Lee, who’s Chief Technical Officer for a domain registrar.

Here’s the link: Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress

The plugin works like a dynamic 301 Redirect page generator and it works beautifully.

I’m already feel a zen-like calm as I feel the traffic returning (especially from the URL pointers from the blogging meme I’d launched and incoming links from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger writing projects)

A note: Be sure configure Dean’s plugin configuration before you activate it. Else it’ll generate redirects based on the default permalink setting (rather than your old permalink setting) and you’ll look like a wanker complaining that the plugin doesn’t work in Dean’s comments section.