Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages

[A_Fotografy]

Hello all,

Something strange happened with my blog site.

I recently signed to MOZ tools.

Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
pages.

Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://outdoorsrank.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts.

For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie

The one with category is

https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/

So basically for some reason category was missing.

Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now.

Thank you,
Regards,
Armands

[A_Fotografy]

Hi,

Thanks for response. So I went back and unchecked Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL option and also

Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. option.

Hope this will solve the problem.

Thanks,

Regards,

Armands

[ThompsonPaul]

From your description, it appears that when you were tweaking your Yoast SEO settings, you changed the permalink structure in the WP Dashboard's Settings > Permalinks section from www.domain.com/�tegory%/%postname%/ to just www.domain.com/%postname%/

Doing this causes all the URLS for all posts on your site to change, which means all the original URLs are no longer correct and result in 404s.

Your two options are:

• reset your permalinks back to their original structure, and redirect whatever new posts were created since the initial change back to the /category/postname URLs
• leave the new permalink structure in place and add a blanket rewrite rule in the htaccess file to redirect all the old post URLs to the new structure without the category. (Done properly, only one redirect is needed to handle all the post URLs.)

Personally, for improved site architecture and to keep from having all your existing posts run through redirects, I'd opt for the first option above.

Hope that all makes sense?

Paul

P.S. Make certain you have a current backup of the site before making any further changes, just in case.