I recently did some clean-up work on my robots.txt file, to stop Google from indexing all of the /feed/ and /trackback/ URL’s that are generated for each post. But I had trouble with two blog articles that started with the word “Feedburner”. I tried many variations for the robots.txt file, but the Google Webmaster kept saying those two were blocked. So I decided to change the URL’s of those two blog articles instead.

How to change the URL of a WordPress Post

1. Note the original URL of the post somewhere

2. Go into the post and click “edit” next to the Permalink

3. Change the Permalink

4. Click “Update” blue button

5. View the post and verify the new URL/Permalink is working

Next you need to tell humans and search engines that the URL/Permalink has changed. This can be done in two ways. You can download a redirect plugin or you can modify your .htaccess file.

Note that whichever method you use, the format usually takes this syntax:

/blog/article-name-old/ http://yourdomainname.com/blog/article-name-new/

The first is the old article, and it is written without the http://yourdomainname.com while the new article URL is written with that included. This rule holds for both creating the redirect inside a .htaccess file and WordPress plugins. Note with .htaccess there is a single space between them and it starts with redirect301.

And yes, my robot.txt did prevent feed/ however it still blocked /feedburner for some reason. So rather than fighting, I renamed the articles. 🙂

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill