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New URLs & Lots of Patients

TwisterMcFor some time I’ve wanted to remove the month, day, year from my URL structure on my blog but I haven’t. Everything I’ve ever learned about SEO is to not change the URLs. However I really wanted to.

Then, late last week, my host somehow blocked Google bot from accessing the server I’m on and my traffic tanked; badly. Once I got that figured out, I realized that now was as good of time as ever to re-do all the URLs. Since my site was already screwed up in Google, why not?

Blog Traffic

Blog Traffic

The other major factor in my decision to change URL structure was that WordPress rocks. By default WordPress automatically 301 redirects all the old URLs to the new URLs. This saves hours of redirect mapping and makes it a bit less painful.

So now here we are. URLs are much simpler as I not only took out the month, day and year but also blog.  I like them a whole lot better, but now I have to wait and see what Google does.

Old URL: https://www.twistermc.com/blog/2010/04/21/bacon-twitter/
New URL: https://www.twistermc.com/2708/bacon-twitter/

More importantly, I need to find out what’s broken! Something tells me that this quick and easy transition will have side effects, I’m just not sure what.

So if you see an issue, do let me know. Otherwise I’ll just be freaking out over the loss of traffic due to the hosting issue and keeping an eye on Google Analytics and webmaster tools to see how things play out.

I’ve got other plans in mind for the site, nothing major, but re-thinking some of the layout. Change is hard, but change is good.


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