#6936 – refresh links

Hi

I was surprise this morning when I changed the name of an article and so the url changed - I was obliged to go back to sh404sef and to change manually all the addresses (well in this case, it was only 2) to be sure that change are applied

Yes, this is expected. Once a URL is in the database, it's registered as THE URL for that article and it's not supposed to change any longer, at least as soon as the article has been published.

The reason is that even if you change the title of an article, that's the "visible" title, the one displayed on the screen to visitors. However, even if you modify the title, you do not want to the URL to change because search engines have already recorded and possibly indexed it, and users may have shared it on Facebook or bookmarked.

So generally, you do not want to change the URL even if you modify the article.

Of course, there are several exceptions:

- if you radically change the title, you may still want to change. In that case, you will also need to add a redirect from the old URL to the new
- if the article has not yet been made public or you're still developing the site

In that case, what you should do is:

- go to sh404SEF and delete the URLs: enter a part of the URL in the search box and when the URL is displayed, select it in the list and use the Delelete with dupl. button in the toolbar
- next time a page which has a link to that article is displayed, the link will be re-created, with the new title
- again, if the article was already published, you must set up a redirect from the old to the new URL or you will loose any SEO ranking you may have for that article.

Once again, in most cases, changing the title should not cause the URL to change, on live site. It may be easier to discuss if you provide us with a real example of the kind of changes you are talking about, ie the before/after URLs in question

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com
@weeblr