In the last few years, I have moved my site around many times. I went from HTML to Geeklog and now to WordPress. Even during each “phase”, I moved things around. That leads to pages getting renamed and incoming links going nowhere. I have always maintained a custom 404 page to at least give a search box and navigation options to visitors who come through an old link. Until now, though, I’ve had no idea exactly how many old, incorrect links are out there.

Now I do!

The Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe not only gives me a 404 log, but allows me the ability to setup a 301 redirection to correct that bad link. Man has this been eye-opening! I had a few 301s in my htaccess setup to handle the free PHP script downloads that have moved. But, I had totally neglected a 301 for my RSS feeds, contact page and a few other pages that would be worthwhile to get users to promptly.

I went through the 404 logs from the last 24 hours and made appropriate 301 entries using this plugin. In the last few minutes, I have already seen several hits for those new 301s. That means users are actually getting where they want to go. Hooray! I plan on sticking with WordPress for awhile, so the links in place now should remain. I’m hopeful the logs will decrease as time goes by and the search engines update with the new links.

If you move your site around or if you’ve recently switched to WordPress from a different CMS or HTML site, I definitely suggest giving this plugin a look. It may help save some of your web traffic you would otherwise lose to bad links.

Tags: Plugins