How to recover your permalinks settings to get your indexed posts back – Don’t loose Google Serps!

September 5th, 2009 by admin | 3 Comments | Filed in Press Releases

BEFORE reading this, it is important to read here, to check you are not still hacked! – SERIOUSLY GUYS, DO IT!!!

Okay, some bloggers seem worried because they have lost their permalink structure, and can’t remember what it was set to! – Could this mean they loose the serp results they have worked so hard for???

This is just a quick note to help all those that have been stuck by the terrible WordPress permalink hacker!

Please note: This is advise only, kingpin-seo.co.uk, nor it’s writers cannot be held responsible for any harm done by messing with your wordpress install, please always backup, backup and backup some more to be sure you can’t loose any data. Bear in mind that if you backup your user accounts though, you may be backing up the hackers account ;-)

Once you have cleaned your blog of the hacker (see this post on the removing the wordpress permalink hacker) then you will probably want to fix your permalinks!

The trouble is, what if you didn’t note down what your permalinks settings were?

How do you figure out what they were if you haven’t seen them for ages???!

Google is Your Friend!

Simple. Let’s say your blog url is: http://www.this-is-an-example-blog.com/blog/

Go to Google.com
In the search box, type this:

site:www.this-is-an-example-blog.com/blog/

You should then see your blogs pages that have been indexed by Google. This should allow you to see your URL structure!

But my URLs are shortened, truncated with “…” added!

Yep, Google likes to show a tidy search results page! Long URLs would look damn ugly!

Don’t Panic!

Simple follow these Steps!

1) Find one of your blogs posts in listed in the Google search described above… (make sure its a post page, not a tag or category page!)

2) Right click on the title of the result (you know, the blue (usually!) underlined link!

3) If you are using Firefox, left lick on ‘Copy Link Location’ – For IE users, you do the same, but click on ‘copy shortcut’ – and Chrome fans, click on ‘Copy Link Address’ – All found by right clicking on the search results title/link

4) Open a text editor (Wordpad, Notepad etc) and paste into there.

This will give you one of your URLs. From here you should be able to work out your old permalink structure, and thus restore it - Saving you loosing SERP results :-)

I hope this helped guys! – Here are some samples of how to decode WordPress permalink structures, and a link to the descriptions on WordPress.org

Firstly, once you think you have sorted the permalink structure (remember to update your .htaccess file if you use one!) the TEST IT BY CLICKING ON ONE OF YOUR BLOGS OLDER RESULTS IN GOOGLE’S SERPS

Restoring WordPress’s Permalink Structure

Lets say your blogs SERP, found in Google’s results is something like:

http://www.my-abc-example-blog.com/blog/01/01/2009/i-like-wordpress-hackers-go-away/

It is a fair bet, that your permalink structure is something like this: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

If you take your time, you should be able to get your wordpress URLs back to exactly the same as they are in Google’s search results.

More info on the WordPress permalink structure can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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