When Wordpress Permalinks 404

I am a WordPress user who has been blogging from 2007 onwards. I have never had any problems with my site or hosting until recently when I was suddenly getting 404 errors for my blog posts. This is of course really distressing as it meant that I couldn't access the content anymore which was what the blog post was supposed to be about!

So this led me to start investigating where the problem might be and after finding out that this had happened to lots of other people in quite a short period of time, it looks like there might have been a "WordPress bug" causing these permalinks to go wrong.

This is just a warning to other WordPress users to check that your permalinks are working properly. If they are not, then you may want to change them right away. Otherwise, you risk losing your hard work!

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Here is the original link:  http://mattcutts.com/blog/when-wordpress-permalinks-404/  It's quite good reading and explains the problem. Basically permalinks were being set as index numbers rather than page names which had been the default way of doing it for years and now it has changed. Matt has also written a post on the same thing with even more information:  http://mattcutts.com/blog/when-wordpress-404s-out-of-control/  I hope this helps! :D

2. Permalinks for Vimeo 

This is good to know if your Vimeo permalinks are having problems: http://vimeo.com/blog/post/8672

3. Permalink GoogleFollow 

Google started making a play for the permalinks search engine business. Their current (and only) version is an API. When you enter a URL, you get back its "perma" attributes, like this:  https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/05/permalink-service-goes-live-what-this.html  This data is cached (if it's not too big) and the Google blog post says that they plan to cache all the data eventually, so even if you delete your link from their index, "we'll still know more about your permalink than anyone else on the planet. We hope it'll be useful not only to us, but also to webmasters." Sounds scary to me. They say they're going to "snoop around the web" for this data?

4. Hiding Permalink  (obsolete) Now, you can delete your permalinks and use Pluarlseo's plugin instead:

5. Some Permalink Tips Pro Blog Design has a few good tips on permalinks:  Pro Blog Design » Blogging Best Practices » Important Tips on Permalinks   7.3 Avoid all CAPITAL LETTERS in your permalinks When you're setting up your permalinks, don't use caps. Use mixed case (e.g., www.

Conclusion

Many of these links may be old and some of them I have not tested; however, it's nice to know that there may be a solution to the wordpress permalinks problem if that is the case. Permalinks are really important in wordpress blogging since they provide a way to link back to your blog and therefore for people visiting your site, they will get an idea about what post they are looking at. Throwing up 404 errors on people's blogs can be really distressing so having some tips listed here may help you out. :)

Thanks for reading! :D

This post was written by a member of the Technorati Editorial Team.