Check Your Permalinks with WordPress 2.1

UPDATE     Here is a great plugin for changing your Permalink structure.   It creates 301 redirects when you change the permalinks.      

I’ve noticed lately that Google was showing a lot of missing URL and  URL’s not found and HTTP errors.

I thought most of those were due to the change in domain names mentioned in other posts here.

Today I noticed that when I installed WordPress 2.1 it set my custom permalinks back to default.   This causes the search engines to get errors when looking for pages previously indexed.

If you have used any permalink structure besides the default structure and have upgraded to 2.1 you should check your permalinks structure.  

Personally, I like the custom set up described in this Permalinks Post.   If you chose carefully the names of your categories using keywords and use the custom setting of /%category%/%postname%/   you should recognize a boost in your search engine results.

I would also recommend you check your google account diagnostics summary page.

I catch a lot of things by looking at that page, unfortunately there have been too many changes lately to domain names and the WordPress 2.1 upgrade.