If you happen to be one of the thousands who have changed your WordPress Permalink Structure, and now all of your internal/external links are broken. You have found that your most popular posts have dropped off from the Google SERP completely, and you are losing thousands of visitors per day! How can you fix them?

Well, maybe not the thousands of visitors part, but you DEFINITELY getting a serious case of RA (red ass) dealing with the issues associated with permalink changes. It seems that some people have pointed to this Quick Permalink Plugin as “the solution”. It is actually the BEST solution I have found for working with WordPress 3.0 and above, yet it will work on some older versions-try at your own risk.

Problem — Permalink Structure Changes

People change their mind. It might be a mis-configuration in the beginning (this is the case for 99%) or semantic change of the site structure, or just for the sake of trying out something new. The fact is, people do change their permalink structure in WordPress, which introduces many traumatic issues after the change. For example,

• All internal links to older posts are broken. It might be fixable by re-editing these posts with internal links.
• All external links to older posts are broken. It might not be as easy to change as you do not have control over the sites on the providing side of links.
• Search engines will start to hate you because of all these broken links. Especially the hard earned ones from trusted sources.

So, how can we change the permalink structure and keep all your links intact?

The next step is easy — just install the Quick Permalink Plugin and activate it. What it does is, whenever a page/post is requested with a different permalink than the one defined in the permalink structure option, it will redirect the request to the canonical permalink. So when the post is loaded with query-string-based URL, it will then redirect the visitor to the new URL based on the new permalink structure.

Description

It adds an option box to the edit section where you can specify the redirect location and type of redirect that you want, temporary, permanent, or meta. See below for additional features added.
Features:
•    Works with new WordPress menus
•    Works with new WordPress Custom Post Types (set option on settings page)
•    You can set a redirect page or menu link to open in a new window (will not work on permalinks)
•    You can add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the page or menu link of the redirect (will not work on permalinks)
•    You can completely re-write the URL for the redirect so it takes the place of the default page URL (rewrite the href link)
•    You can redirect without needing to create a Page or Post. This is very useful for sites that were converted to WordPress and have old links that create 404 errors (see FAQs for more information). This option does not allow for open in a new window or nofollow functions.
•    Redirect Location can be to another WordPress page/post or any other website with an external URL.
•    Redirect can use a full URL path, the post or page ID, permalink or page-name (not available for Quick Redirects method).
•    Option Screen to set global overrides like turning off all redirects at once, setting a global destination link, make all redirect open in a new window, etc.
•    View a summary of all individual redirected pages/posts or custom post types that are currently set up.

This plugin is not compatible with WordPress versions less than 2.5. Requires PHP 5+.

PLEASE NOTE: A new page or post needs to be Published in order for the redirect to happen. It WILL work on a DRAFT Status Post/Page ONLY, and I mean ONLY, if the Post/Page has FIRST been Published and the re-saved as a Draft.

TROUBLESHOOTING:

•    To include custom post types, check the setting on the main plugin option page.
•    If you check the box for "Show Redirect URL below" on the edit page, please note that you MUST use the full URL in the Redirect URL box. If you do not, you may experience some odd links and 404 pages, as this option changes the Permalink for the page/post to the EXACT URL you enter in that field. (i.e., if you enter '2' in the field, it will redirect to 'http://2' which is not the same as 'http://yoursite.com/?p=2').
•    If your browser tells you that your are in an infinite loop, check to make sure you do not have pages redirecting to another page that redirects back to the initial page. That WILL cause an infinite loop.
•    If you are using the Quick 301 Redirects method to do your redirects, be sure that your Request URL starts with a / and is relative to the root (i.e., http://mysite.com/test/ would have /test/ in the request field).
•    Links in page/post content and Permalinks will not open in a new window or add the rel=nofollow. That is because the theme template actually sets up the links by calling "the_permalink()" function so add these elements is not consistently possible so it has been excluded from the functionality.
•    If your page or post is not redirecting, this is most likely because something else like the theme functions file or another plugin is outputting the header BEFORE the plugin can perform the redirect. This can be tested by turning off all plugins except the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin and testing if the redirect works. 9 out of 10 times, a plugin or bad code is the culprit.
•    We have tested the plugin in dozens of themes and alongside a whole lot more plugins. In our experience, (with exception to a few bugs) most of the time another plugin is the problem. If you do notice a problem, please let them know at plugins@fischercreativemedia.com – along with the WP version, theme you are using and plugins you have installed – and they will try to troubleshoot the problem.

The creator of the plug in is Don Fischer

You can visit his site here: Quick Permalink Plugin