Prevent slug/permalink changes on title changes

Most users won’t have a clue that changing the title will change the URL. Hopefully people won’t change their titles willy-nilly, but where there’s a way, some will.

I would suggest:

They are treated just like regular post and page URLs…the permalink is based on the title and once set, can only be changed explicitly via the backend permalink editor.

This would be familiar to everyone, and if it was done by role, even an admin or editor could “accidentally” change a URL because they corrected or updated a title.

If a user wants or needs to change a URL, they are still able to contact the site owner or an admin to request a change.

This is the best for search engines, users, and site owners.

cheers

Sorry, but I have to strongly disagree. Allowing URLs to change indiscriminately as a secondary action to a title change is bad.

It runs the potential of broken links internally and externally.

It introduces “accidental” URL changes that were never desired in the first place.

404s like this will be a back user-experience, and runs the risk of diminishing the quality signal to Google and other search engines, especially for URLs that they have previously crawled on the site (not just an external link that may have been malformed to begin with).

Wordpress adopted the present treatment of post and page URLs because the best practice with URLs is that they should rarely be changed once created, and if changed, it should be an active process that allows more control and the ability for redirects to be put in place to preserve the link integrity.

I venture that most GD instances will be on small, average, non-brand/non-authoritative sites that may also be brand new sites starting out. That is already one large hurdle to overcome without sending low quality signals on top of.

In the extreme instances where there are massive URL changes, I’ve seen much bigger, authoritative brand sites see their search engine performance and traffic dropped to half or even a quarter of what it was and often still struggle for months to regain that position.

Everyone things the most important thing with SEO is title tags…it’s not. URLs and the handling of URLs is the single most important SEO principle.

Allowing explicit permalink changes from within the Admin area provides the benefit if being able to change URLs while removing nearly all of the risk of doing so, and those risks are now solely in the hands of people who should know how to mitigate those risks.

cheers