Last Updated on April 20, 2020

So, you decided that you need highly optimized permalinks for your blog. You don’t want to see the word “blog” in all your permalinks, and you came to the conclusion the a structure like /%postname%/ is much better than the one which displayed also the date of the posts.

The change is easy to make if you are on WordPress: for example, you can use Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin, plus the blog folder change to the main domain – you need to operate the change in Options – Blog Address, in your admin board.

But are you aware what this change would trigger? I just did it three days ago, and I can give you some positives and some negatives:

Positives:

1. The CTR of contextual ads increased significantly. Actually, I was about to think that somebody wants my account closed and is working hard to see it happening. But it was not the case. The increase is due to the fact that the weight of the relevant keywords in the permalinks is bigger, thus the ads being more focused on each article’s topic.
2. The CPC of contextual ads increased. This is due to the fact that the posts which have ads were written with some well paying keywords in mind, and now the ads are better targeted on those keywords.
3. The organic search traffic increased slightly. I don’t know if there is a real correlation between this increase and the permalinks change, but I think the next days will tell if it is true, or it was only a coincidence.

Negatives

1. Bye-bye old feed subscribers. As the feed address changes with the permalinks if you give up the /blog folder, your subscribers won’t get your posts in their feed reader anymore. You need to operate the change in your Feedburner feed, to make it send out your new posts.
2. Bye-bye new feed subscribers. The feed will give an error message when somebody will want to subscribe. (Many thanks to Ronald for pointing me out these feed issues)
3. Farewell AdSense URL channels tracking. All 200 channels you defined over the past year are useless now, as they lead to URLs which no longer exist. I’m sorry, but the only solution is to delete the old channels and to define them again.
4. Text Link Ads troubles. If you are still with TLA, and you display their text links, you’ll get the message that ads are not showing and you won’t get paid until you fix the problem. There is no possibility that you change the URL in the TLA inventory by yourself. You have to write them to do the change for you (which they will do very quickly).

Have you ever changed your blog’s permalinks? Can you figure out some more positives and negatives for this move?