HELP! My Permalinks Not So Permanent!

When you're changing the article to a featured article, you're changing the category, right?

Are you also unchecking the category you set for the article?

Are you using the WP's built-in "sticky" feature or a plugin to 'feature' those posts?

If a plugin, maybe the plugin is changing the category of the featured posts (by creating a "featured" cat without telling you...)

This is a really big site. Some articles may fit in more than one category.
Featured is one of the categories.

So lets say I put the article in Acne Cream category. Then later I want to feature it. I STILL have it in Acne Cream category but click the "featured category" to feature it.

So now it is in both categories but the permalink changes to "Featured" now when I take it off featured it goes back to the original category but still it makes it hard for link building.

Any tips on what I need to do here?

You cannot do anything. When the category is included in the permalink, only ONE category will be part of the URL, even if the post is assigned to 55 categories.

In the permalink WP will show the category with the lowest ID#. Obviously, the "featured" cat has a lower ID# then the other one...

Note. The WP developers strongly recommend NOT to start the permalink with the category to avoid performance issues.

Hmm so how do I change it so permalinks do not start with category. I have a general category and then posts under it.

When you say lowest ID ...what do you mean? Thanks!

Sorry for the late reply.

1. Remove the "%category%" portion of your permalink settings if you don't want the category in the permalinks.

2. Every category (as well as posts, links etc, - everything that is stored in the database in "rows" - it has a 'number' = an ID of its own. E.g. WP comes out of the box with the Uncategorized category and that has ID#1. Then you create a new category and that will be #2, and so on.
So, if your post is assigned to cat ID#3 and #4 and #26... and the %category% tag is part of your permalink structure - WP will use the category with the lowest ID = #3 (since 4 and 26 are higher numbers)

Lee..

If you would like me to sort this out for you, feel free to PM me your login details and I will fix it real quick...

No charge for friends

Peace

Jay

Just want to add to what others have said that it is a good thing that WP will only name the post permalink with one category. If it created a page in all categories you chose, your site would have duplicate content on it.

Also, I've been reading about permalinks on Wordpress. Apparently, the software has an easier time sorting things out if the first part is a number.

So, while using /%category%/%postname%/ may be good for SEO purposes, it doesn't help processing time. For small sites, that should be no big deal, but for very busy or large sites, it may make more sense to start the permalink with the post ID number or date followed by the postname.

And I also saw one article that said Google news needs (or maybe just prefers) URLs that have three numbers in them. I haven't submitted any of my sites for inclusion in Google news, so I'm not sure if that's true or not.

So, I've switched some of my Wordpress sites over to the month/day URL scheme. This makes a URL look like www.mydomain.com/2009/10/12/my-great-article. And I thought that would have broken my existing links, but clever software that it is, Wordpress redirects from the old category/postname quite nicely to the new structure.

EDIT: Upon further reading, after my source had posted info on using numbers in URLs submitted to Google News, Google changed that requirement, as long as you have a news sitemap. Check out the link below...

Google News no longer requires stupid numbers in the URL

I can't remove the category and make it this %postname%/ because when I do it messes everything up ie I get an error when I click on either category or the subposts (cant remember which one it was - I tried doing this)

But I have all my categories now...so what might work would be to change the ID number of the featured category and make it last.

If you can tell me how to change that should be a quick fix ? haha maybe

At this point I don't want to change the link style around to much as I have already been driving traffic there.

It would not be an issue if I featured the article once..then changed category and that was it. But these are timeless articles and I would like to feature them more than once.

Well, I really don't think there's going to be too much impact if you just leave things the way they are. You won't miss out on very much by having that post's category show up as 'featured'.

Plus, the post does still show up under the various categories on the category page, which, if I remember right, does get indexed.

So, I don't think it'll cost you anything if you leave it.

It does...because the name changes.

If it is featured. It has featured as the category name. When I stop featuring it, it goes back to the regular category I had it in.
So if I use that post to drive traffic to it changes.

Since I want may to feature an article on and off through out the year...it would be nice to fix.

Well, with Wordpress' ability to redirect, this may still not be a big issue.

Do this...put the address of that post in your browser's address bar, but instead of 'featured' put the regular category in the category part of the address. (Do this while the post is set to 'featured'.)

What happens?