Permalinks Death Penalty

Never change your Blog permalinks!
I learned that lesson the hard way.
If you have no idea what I am talking about that is great news.
Stop reading now!
Click the Back button on your browser and read something else!
(A five second pause as the Back button is clicked…)
Okay, then. 

You stayed because you, too, have betrayed your permalinks. Permalinks
as you know, is the way your blog creates a permanent URL address so
people can find you via web browsing, RSS feeds and search engines.

After posting 100 messages I decided I didn’t like my permalinks
structure and I went into WordPress (OPTIONS | PERMALINKS) and changed
them to something more appealing:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Well that new
structure was fine and lovely but I quite soon discovered I
subsequently destroyed all the outside links to my existing messages!

Changing the permalinks on your website immediately kills the hotlinks
others have kindly forged to your material.

You kick down a favor
when you change your permalinks structure. You can try to restore your
default permalinks structure but I was never able to recover the broken
links.

You will be lost to Google and Yahoo! Search
and MSN and all the other indexing search services if and until they
decide to Bot you again.
If you are lucky your links will be re-discovered and re-linked to your
new permalinks structure but how often do you check your old outside
links to other blogs to see if each message is still alive?

Exactly.
Dead is dead when you modify your permalinks structure.