Unable to change permalinks for a particular page

As part of permalinks you could go to admin > appearance > menus

and there you can create menu (or if you have it alredy) you can there add custom links to your manu :

URL: https://forum.wesbite.com
Label: Forum

and
URL: https://classifieds.website.com

Label: Classified

Also on that page that you where changing link try puting link without “www” “https://forum.wesbite.com”

About shuting down old link if you are using Godaddy hosting as i do there is no way to do so. Only option for example on Godaddy for me was to register a dummy domain that i dont use and put it as primarry on my root folder, then i made folders for my other domains (in your example)
“main_site_folder”
“forum_dir”
“classifieds”

in that way “https://dummydomain.com” is showing all links like:
https://dummydomain.com/main_site_folder
https://dummydomain.com/forum_dir
https://dummydomain.com/classifieds
but i dont use that domain so its ok, and my main domain is not showing double links.

Keep in mind for seting up this will require you to compleatly reinstall everything on your host and always make backups before doing anything.

Hope it helps,

Best Regards,
Danedral

Try deleting the old folders that you don’t want and remove their links/references from your database. Have you setup separate WordPress installations for those sub-directories?

Backup your site so that you can restore if anything goes wrong.

Thanks a lot Danedral. The first step worked easily. I have now changed the link to the new subdomain.

The next thing about shutting down old link seems to be complicated or risky for me to do. Is there a problem if this old link remains active ? Especially since there will not be any link to it from my main website i.e https://www.website.com

Leaving the old link can cause problems if it has the same content as any of your other URLs/site as Google will treat it as duplicate content (and hence penalized).

Dear Krishna,

I do want the old folder as in my general setup I have now linked the new subdomain i.e forum.website.com to the directories of the old link of website.com/forum

No, wordpress installation is only for the main site i.e website.com , the subdirectories are installed with myBB for forum.website.com and OSclass for classified.website.com

Please let me know how to delete the old link/references from the database. I’m a newbie and I do not want to crash my website already.

Just did my backup yesterday ,still I do not want to take risk as users have just started using my website.

Content is what Google looks for, not if you use WordPress or any other CMS. A better place to find answers for this kind of questions is Google forums (your webmaster tools account and other help links there).

You are welcome stanjohn123.

you can always add links you dont want google to crowle in to your robot.txt (that is easyest way to prevent problems with google).

For more about robot.txt you can find on this link:
https://www.robotstxt.org/

Or you can generate robot.txt file on one of the online generators one of them is: https://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp

Regards,
Danedral

Dear Danedral,

Are you saying that if I use this robot.txt file google will not be able to find out about the 2 links I have to the same website ?

Thanks and Regards
Stani

Hi Danedral,

I read about the robotstxt file but not really convinced. I just don’t want the URL , website.com/forums to show any content of my page at all. It should show an error page. How could I do that ?

Thanks,

Dear Danedral,

I have successfully redirected the old URL to my new subdomain using cpanel.So any user who tries to enter the old URL will be directed to the new sub domain.

It’s highly unlikely that this website.com/forum_dir will come up on google search.

I guess this is enough for now. Thanks for all your help.

Regards
Stani

How did you redirect? It should be a 301 redirect (permanent). If that is not possible you can just add the links that you do not want indexed in your robots.txt file under Disallow. That will solve the problem.

stanjohn123 sorry i was little busy, well as Krishna said you are not hiding the link you are just notifying goolge not to index that link by Disallowing it in robot.txt and that is more then enough.

Glad you fixed the problem hf with your site ??

Best Regards,
Danedral

@krishna : Yes it was a permanent redirect. The cpanel has every option possible. It makes people like me even more lazier. Thanks.

@danedral: No problem.Thank you.

This issue resolved.