Changing Category Names in Wordpress Blog & Inbound Links

[EricVallee34]

I'm working on a wordpress blog, /www.athleticfoodie.com, and I'd like to change the names of the categories so that I include keywords.

If I change the current category name of "Healthy Recipes" to "Recipes for Athletes" will I lose the inbound links associated with the category and/or posts?  Is there a way to prevent this?

[EGOL]

If you go into wordpress and click the "category" link on the left side, then select a category, you can see the controls.

You can edit the "name" but keep the same "slug".  The slug controls the URL.

This will enable you to change the name but keep the slug and not need to request changes on your incoming links.

This will work great if you are happy with your current URLs.

(you can also create unique descriptions for each category here that Google will sometimes display in the SERPs.)

[TaitLarson]

Short Answer: If you change your category slugs in WordPress, you will potentially lose links

Long Answer...

WordPress is pretty decent at taking a URL from a request that it doesn't have a match for and trying to match it to a post or category even when the category slug has changed slightly.

Google is also pretty decent at figuring out that your content hasn't changed but has a new home.

That said, I never rely on WordPress + Google to do the right thing in this case.  I always end up writing rewrite rules in my .htaccess file that performs a 301 redirect.  If people just link to the first page of each category then do

RewriteRule ^category/foo/?$ /category/bar/ [R=permanent, L]

You can see the mod_rewrite documentation for more info.

Of course check the number of inbound links you've received before doing any of this to make sure that it's worth the effort.

[EricVallee34]

Thanks, EGOL.  Great advice!

[EricVallee34]

Thanks, Tait.  This is very helpful!

[TaitLarson]

You are very welcome!