Does a Failed WordPress Upgrade Change the Permalinks?
None of my post links on this blog worked earlier, they all returned 404 Errors. I could not think why, apart from recently I tried the automatic WordPress upgrade which subsequently failed so left the site as it was (it always fails!). As a result any Google indexed results were not found, and the Tweets icon could not update. This is quite a serious issue for well ranked and visited blogs. I had no idea until I just visited one of the pages.
After some digging around I noticed my custom permalinks setttings have been reset back to the default! It also included the sub-folder /blog/ in it, so every URL had /blog/blog/ in it and subsequently a 404 was found.
I can only think the failed update changed the settings which is seriously bad.
To fix it, and without knowing what my old custom permalink setting was, I took a look at a Google indexed URL, for example, http://www.amitywebsolutions.co.uk/blog/general/667-importance-of-updatingupgrading-your-website/, then cross referencing this with the tags list on WordPress here http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks I could determine my Custom Permailink Setting was:
/%category%/%post_id%-%postname%/
So all is fixed again! My URLs are still indexed on Google, lets hope this issue has not affected rankings or visitors.
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