Wordpress permalinks structure, wtf?

C

co_okie

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Dec 3, 2011
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Ok so I got my hands on a 5 year old site, massive traffic, huge in serps it's delicious.

Though the previous owner has Default wordpress permalinks structure, had no sitemap, just the overall on page optimization is just "how the fuck is this site ranking so high".

My question is should I use some 301 wordpress plugin and change the permalink structure to /%postname%/

Would this affect my site in serps or have any bad impact? I mean I know I'm missing out for not using those nice permalinks and also not having proper description and keywords added to each post.

The previous owner built it pretty much this way, buy domain, install wordpress, start posting.. and profit.

What would you guys suggest?
 


How many posts are there? That would have a huge affect on how much of a pain it would be to 301 them all.

Simple 301 plugin works well.

Every 301 loses some page authority. Just a matter of how much you would gain with clean urls.

I would do it myself.
 
I have 700 something posts.

Let me explain a little more about it, the site gets about 1 million visitors and over 5 million page impressions monthly, huge direct traffic and huge SE traffic.

The site ranks #1 respectively #2 for a lot of main keywords that have from 200k exact to 40k, and others with couple of thousands. The thing is that over 90% of the visitors come directly to the front page searching with the main keywords.

Now the keywords are brand type keywords, example people instead of searching for "car insurance" they search directly for "farmers" or "AAA".

I know I'm missing huge for not having proper permalinks and not having them properly optimized with meta description keywords and all the on-page goodies, the previous owner never did any of this.

I'm just a little bit anxious about doing this change and how it can affect the site.

Any insights on this would be very much appreciated.
 
Permalinks are over rated. If the traffic is there and you are banking leave it alone and keep adding quality content.
 
butcher said:
Permalinks are over rated. If the traffic is there and you are banking leave it alone and keep adding quality content.
Click to expand...

That's the thing the site's been like this for over a 4 years now, never had any problems with any of google updates, it grew naturally and when I say naturally I mean hasn't been touched with any type of link building services.

Though I think I'm missing out on SE traffic to the posts themselves. I have very little search engine traffic on the posts, though they are not optimized at all.
 
butcher said:
Permalinks are over rated. If the traffic is there and you are banking leave it alone and keep adding quality content.
Click to expand...
+1 for this brah

If you are getting 1 million visitors and over 5 million page impressions with that freaking permalink structure then just add content and use the same set up he's using...

You wouldn't want to risk that Big traffic for your trial and error right? If it works, it works. Don't try to change it and regret later.
 
Over 700 posts? don't even think about changing the permalinks. If they aren't done perfect, they could hurt your site tremendously.
 
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