old permalinks not found

Question

Looking through Google Webmaster Tools, I have a lot of 404s for posts with permalink structure of /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/

I have since changed permalinks to /%category%/%postname%.html

I thought Wordpress could redirect old post URLs to new post URLS, but the old date based URLs are generating 404s.

My .htaccess file is writable, set to 644.

Why is this occurring? Thanks!

Answer 1

WordPress doesn’t catch all old URLs, you have to help it. Add the following code to your .htaccess above the WordPress rewrite rules:

RedirectMatch permanent /\d+/\d+/\d+/(.+)$ /?pagename=$1