How To Change Old Post URL In WordPress Keeping Your Ranking
Post permalink or post URL is an on-page SEO factor, I have already told in my article On Page SEO techniques. Post URL is a ranking factor so you must keep it SEO friendly. You need to add you keywords in the permalink, try to make it short and sweet. Sometimes we need to change old post URL in WordPress.
If you have already published your post and Google has indexed your post. Now want to change the URL to make it SEO friendly. I do not recommend you to change the URL of your indexed post just for adding your keywords and make it SEO friendly.
But if you still want to change old post URL in WordPress and you want to keep your rank safe and secure. You can do it, just follow the below steps that help you change the published post URL without losing ranking.
In WordPress, you can easily edit your new post URL or permalink.
By default, WordPress add a permalink from your post title but that may not be SEO friendly. Then you need to edit your permalink.
Just click Edit on Permalink option just under your post title.
Add your keywords on the permalink. Make it short just add your keywords and remove stop words such as a,an, the, are, by, both, who, what, to, on, and more.
This slug is SEO friendly. The default slug is not SEO friendly because it may long, ugly and contains different stop words that are useless. This way you can edit your unpublish post URL.
Now update published post or old post URL without losing traffic.
How to Change Old Post URL In WordPress
#Redirect Old URL to New URL
You can easily redirect (301 redirection) old URL to new URL using Redirection WordPress plugin.
Most of the time WordPress automatically redirects old URL to new URL when you change. But sometimes something goes wrong. So you should do it manually.
You need to setup 301 redirection, it is a process that sends traffic and search engines bots from old URL to new URL.
Just install and activate Redirection plugin, go to Dashboard >> Tools >> Redirection.
Here you can see Add new redirection option.
Enter your old URL in Source URL box and New URL in Target URL box.
Finally, click on Add Redirection Button.
You have done. Now your old URL will be redirected to the new URL.
#Update Internal Link with New URL
You need to update your internal link with your new URL so that search engines bots find your URL for indexing quality.
Go to Google Search Console of Google Webmaster Tools. Log in to your account and select your site.
Click on Search Traffic >> Internal Links. Now enter your old URL and click on Find.
Now you can see all the internal links for that URL.
Go to the single post and update the old URL.
#Index Your New URL Quickly by Using Fetch as Google
Google and other search engines always take enough time to index your new post URL. You can easily minimize the indexing time.
You need to use Fetch as Google from Google Webmaster Tools.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools >> Crawl >> Fetch as Google.
Now enter the new URL and click on Fetch.
Now click on Request Indexing after your URL.
Then select Crawl only this URL and finally click on Go button.
That;s it. Google will index your URL quickly.
Conclusion
This is the process to change old post URL in WordPress keeping your rank and traffic safe and secure. I hope this article will be helpful. You will be perfect if you want to change your old post URL following these steps.
