Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing regarding the removal of product and category bases. Thank you for raising your concerns.
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Stripping Bases for New or Selected Products: When using Rank Math, the option to strip the category base is an all-or-nothing process. This means that once you enable the setting, it will apply to all categories and products across your site, not just selected ones.
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Best Practices for Existing Indexed URLs: If you decide to remove the category base, it’s important to ensure that all existing indexed URLs are properly redirected to avoid 404 errors. Rank Math automatically handles redirection for you when you enable the Strip Category Base option, so your existing category URLs will redirect to the new shorter URLs. This helps maintain your SEO rankings and ensures a smooth transition for users visiting your site.
If you have more questions or need further clarification, feel free to follow up! We’re here to help.
Sources:
How to Remove the Category Base From WordPress » Rank Math
WordPress Permalink Structure & Changing Individual URLs » Rank Math
Hi The bot has answered well but if I change the permalink structure and strip the bases then will the existing urls remain in the index or will they be replaced.
Will instant indexing of the ne baseless URLs speed up this reindexing
While this happens will my ranking be effected.
What is the best way to go about this
Will the redirects be there forever or once the new urls are ranked I can (somehow?) delete the redirests
Hello,
1. When you change the permalink structure or use our Strip base feature, a redirection will be added automatically for the affected URLs, this will maintain SEO juice and will avoid deranking the said URLs.
2. Instead of re-indexing the URLs, we suggest relying on redirection instead.
3. Changing your permalink structure, such as removing the base, can affect your rankings temporarily as Google re-crawls and re-indexes the new URLs. To minimize impact, a redirection must be established as we have mentioned above.
4. Yes, once you are sure that the new permalinks are indexed on the SERP, you can safely remove the redirections.
Hope that helps.
Thanks Helps but as the strip of base sets a global redirection by Rank Math how do I then remove that once the new urls are indexed?
For backlinks I should create manual redirects for these once all other redirects are removed?
There are a lot of products and I understand that a lot of redirections can affect ranking?
Thanks
Hello,
Our plugin automatically redirects the old URLs to the new ones when you enable the Strip Category Base option. You can’t disable or remove them. Once Google indexes the new URLs, they will no longer crawl the old URLs so the redirections won’t affect your site’s performance.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
OK – but the redirect is still there. How do you do it – by altering htaccess file?
Hello,
This happens internally. The redirect will not show in your .htaccess file or in Rank Math > Redirections.
We hope this helps clarify the issue. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.
I’m still not clear. You automatically create the redirects when striping the base. What happens to those redirect once the new urls once the new urls are indexed?
Hello,
The redirections are not created. When someone visits the old URLs with the base, our plugin redirects them to the correct URL. This is done to make sure that the users or search engines don’t get a 404 error if they visit the old URLs by mistake.
Once the new URLs are indexed, people or crawlers will not visit the old URLs and the redirections will not take place or affect your site.
Please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
We are super happy that we were able to address your concerns.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
