Site Restructuring and Minimizing Damage

I have a site with ~100 articles on it. When i made this site 4 years ago, I was a noob to IM and had no clue regarding proper silo structure. After reading BTB's post and rankxl's course, it seems I missed a crucial ingredient in an authority site build plan and now realize the real value.

My questions:

1. Have you successfully restructured a site for the better?
2. If I change permalink structure, are my backlinks now worthless? eg. change from %postname% to %category%postname%, will links pointing to just the postname not work now?

Good that you are planning to improve your site architecture.

To answer your questions

1. I haven't resurrected any site from the dead. But I have changed the permalink structure of my site once.

2. If you wish to change the permalink structure then this is what I would suggest.

Change the permalink structure in wp to have something similar to www.**yoursite**.com/***post-name***/
Install the Quick Redirects plugin and then use it to do a 301 redirect from the old post to the new post. This will make all the backlinks pointing to the old post to be redirected to the new post.

I did this over the last month with subpages.

I did them one at a time and 301'd old url to new.

The rankings have come back every time, maybe 1 place below but that could be other external factors affecting that.

Is your site ranking well enough that you are risking much in a change? And if it IS ranking well, why change it? Two questions to ask yourself...

-ThopHayt

ThopHayt said:

Is your site ranking well enough that you are risking much in a change? And if it IS ranking well, why change it? Two questions to ask yourself...

-ThopHayt

Click to expand...

The majority of my traffic comes from yahoo/bing, i'm hardly in top 100 for any of my keywords in google. So I would say no, there isn't too much at stake. I'm confident it isn't a competition issue, lots of my keywords are ranking sites purely on strong domains (ie. no page backlinks, not optimized for keyword, etc).