How to Restructure Your Blog Categories

When I started this blog 3 months ago I thought I had planned out the site really well. I had several posts in mind and broad categories to encapsulate the subject matter. Then as time progress Not-So Boring Life started to change and so did the content and categories. In order to maintain some sort of organization to the site as it grows I’ve finally decided on several new categories which will eventually contain over 50 different hobbies.

What you can learn from my mistake.

When you setup your permalinks with /%category%/%postname%/ you can’t just rearrange your posts into the new category structure. If you do you’ll take a huge SE hit because your old posts will be forced to take the new category structure in the url and you’ll lose all the backlinks to your post. In order to alleviate this issue you really only have one option and that is to add a second category to the post you want moved. The issue with this is that it creates duplicate content within the category pages and you’ve got ‘duplicate’ categories displayed for the same content.

Here’s the trick.

Wordpress uses the wp_list_cats to call the categories listed in the sidebard widget. There is a parameter called ‘exclude’ which will keep certain categories from being displayed, so now the posts I made will still retain their original url, but will be hidden as not to confuse the new structure of the categories.