SEO Issue - How do you remove an old Wordpress slug?

Posted article, then changed the category it is in

[Sootah]

I recently posted an article on my main site, and a bit after posting it I realized that I had forgotten to choose the correct category.

I then edited the post, removed the old category, and selected the correct one. The permalink to the post automatically updated to the correct /correctcategory/post-name-here format and I thought that all was well.

Since then I have learned that the /wrongcategory/post-name-here link still works, and as such the page is effectively duplicated as far as the search engines are concerned since the exact same page pulls up under two different URLs.

Since I fixed the issue right after editing the article I don't have to worry about any external links to the old, incorrect URL. How do I remove the old slug so that only the correct one pulls up the article?

Also, I'd rather have it do a 301 redirect from any old altered slugs to the new post anyway as opposed to simply pulling up the same page. Is there any way to do this?

Thanks in advance!

-Sootah

[Ahkamden]

What SEF plugin are you using?

Worst case is you can manually edit htaccess, but I think Platinum SEO can do 301, not sure about All in One SEO

[Sootah]

Currently I'm not using any Wordpress SEF plugin. This may sound naive, but should I be? Aside from some URL modifications and whatnot (most of which I do manually anyway), I've never really seen too much value in them.

That being said, I've not really looked into them at all. Do ya'll recommend using an SEO plugin with Wordpress? If so, what are your reasons? (Specific ones, preferably.. :) )

[Ahkamden]

Interesting..lol my response was from habit. I'm not even sure how WP has changed it's native handling of urls in awhile. I'm a habitual user of All in one SEO. And always seemed to take care of issues. From my post above though, doing some reading before has pointed that Platinum SEO can do 301s.

If you're using built in. I think you'd have to do it through htaccess.

[ergophobe]

I thought WP was supposed to be handling this better.

You could try the Redirection plugin. It will let you 301 or 302 anything - page addresses, aff links, whatever.

I use the Headspace2 plugin because it allows me many things. Some premium themes have similar features. OTTOMH,

- custom excerpts (to avoir dupe content)
- custom read more text (for varied anchor text)
- custom meta description tags
- custom meta titles that are not the same as post title
- complete follow/nofollow and index/noindex control (for boilerplate, category pages, etc)
- simple integration of Google Analytics, Mint, WMT and many others, but most useful for the analytics because you can keep admin visits out of the count, which is useful for a new, low-traffic site.
- first time visitor notice - if user doesn't have cookie, show special welcome message
- lots of other features.