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Permalinks are permanent links to the individual posts in your blog. This is the URL that is posted at various sites, in posts, articles and search engines which link directly to your post.

Since it is meant to be a permanent link to the post, changing the permalink structure will result in breaks in your links leading to a 404 Page cannot be found page.

Most new to WordPress would most likely leave the permalink structure at default in which case your links will look like this: http://www.someuseless.info/?p=240.

A preferred permalink structure is: http://www.someuseless.info/internet-marketing/adgridwork-free-contextual-advertising/ where keywords of the post are included in the link.

Not only does it give more direct information about the post, it also helps in search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

Not all is lost if you’ve set your permalink structure to default. You can change the permalink structure painlessly – while keeping your links intact.

A WordPress plugin called Permanent Redirect written by Scott Yang at Fucoder.com uses a 301 redirect which automatically redirects an incorrect URL to the correct URL in the permalink structure specified.

How To Install Permanent Redirect

1. After uploading the file ylsy_permalink_redirect.php into your WordPress plugins folder, go to Plugins and activate it.

2. Go to Permanent Redirect under Options and key in the tag of your old permalink structure and update file.

3. Go to Permalinks and set the new permalink structure you want. Make sure that it ends with a trailing backslash. Update file.

4. When you go back to Permanent Redirect, you will see the new permalink structure shown.

4. Test your links.

Disclaimer
This is exactly how I did the permalink structure change and it worked fine. However, before activating the plugin, you should go to the developer’s website to read about it and other users’ comments.

Also, if you’ve been used to the freedom of changing post titles as and when you like, even after publishing without affecting the linking, know that with titles in the permalinks now, if you change the title, the links will also have to be manually changed. So extra caution is required – double check everything before hitting Publish.