cleverhack dot com - A Blog About Technology, Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and More. » Blog Archive » Search engines, permalinks and whether to let things be

Posted by joy

I’m throwing 404s in WordPress tonight as I updated the permalink structure a few days ago and got rid of the /archives/ subdirectory.

Googlebot has been up and down my site tonight, but I’m wondering about whether to go and research a method to redirect the broken URLs with /archives/ or to just let the URLs to fade away as the site gets crawled by the search engines. If I let things be, the only problem would be incoming links to posts from the outside world - which I do not have that many. Most people just link to my home page.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 11:19 pm and is filed under General, Site Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “Search engines, permalinks and whether to let things be”

Chris Lawrence Says:
June 27th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Apache mod_rewrite is your friend… at the very least, you could redirect all of the /archives requests into your front page so people don’t get 404s and have a shot to search for what they want.
joy Says:
June 27th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Chris,

WordPress already redirects a visitors who asked for a non-existent file or directory to the front page.

If it’s a bad permalink, then the visitor gets directed to a WordPress generated 404 page within the blog - and technically that’s a 302 redirect, which isn’t so great for search engine optimization.
joy Says:
June 27th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
OT: I can’t spell worth a damn if I’m tired. Check out the post URI.