I only started this blog a couple of weeks ago, I started well and changed the permalinks to /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ which I thought was good enough but later, I updated my Stumbled WordPress Widget and modified the date to put the post first on the main page. but, of course, the permalink changed. grrr, my stats showed that some google hits 404′d on the old permalink, double grrrr

I ended up making another post with the old permalink title and linking it to the new one. phew

then, on one of my (unhealthily) regular trips to the Live plugin in wp-admin, I noticed a few real-time hits coming in to pages that 404′d because I’d edited their timestamp too…I had to do something about it and that’s how I found Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin. Once installed, you can change your permalinks to whatever you want and enter the old permalink style into the plugin settings in the permalinkmigration tab under options and it will automatically do a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect for all the old links.

Search engines will see it as a ‘proper’ redirect and update their indexes and you wont lose any page rank!

I’ve seen on other blogs that /%postname%/ is the best format to use, one place said that if you haven’t changed your permalinks by now then it was too late!!

problem solved, thanks Dean Lee!, by the way, check out his msn chatbot, you can add it to your friends and chat with it all day! I had a chat for 15 minutes, it was quite amusing!