Changing Permalinks On Existing Website

[edgarf76]

I would like to change the permalink setups i have on older websites but do not want to run into a problem. Old older websites I have not permalink structure, now I use the the date structure. If I change permilinks now will it mess anything up? Is there a better way to go about this? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[jpettersson]

Hi edgarf76,
I think if you need to change the permalinks then you should do a 301 (permanent redirect) the old links to the new ones.
You can do it in the .htaccess - it should look something like:
redirect 301 old_slug new_slug

Are you sure you want to do that?
Maybe you can share why you want to do it, what you want to achieve?

[edgarf76]

Thanks for the reply, I dont think that method is going to work for me. I thought I explained why I want to change the permalinks. On my old sites when I make a post via wordpress (not page) it is different than my newer sites. For instance,

Old sites

ABC.com/best-strategies-for-online-slot-players


New sites

ABC.com/2014-10-14/best-strategies-for-online-slot-players


I do not want to take the chance to duplicating the title, also I want to make each post unique, with the date listed in the url.

[Dealer Dan]

(1) Get a list of all of the URLs on the sites you will be changing the URLs.
(2) Change the URLs.
(3) Do a 301 redirect in htaccess pointing all old URLs to the new URLS.

That's all that needs to be done. There'll be no duplication issues or anything like that, no 404 errors, as well as no negative effect on SEO.