I had a big problem within about 3 days of starting this blog. I changed to fancy permalinks rather than the default ones.
For those of you who are not familiar with the terms here let me clarify this. Essentially, the permalink is literally the permanent link (ah - PERMA-LINK) to your blog post. It doesn’t matter where it is linked to or from this link will always be with the blog post - even if it is shown on a page with lots of other posts. This is a good thing - it means your post can always be found.
Until you change things that is!
Lots of new WordPress users will start their blog and find out that they could have made their permalinks more search engine friendly after they have madly created a dozen or more posts in the first flush of enthusiasm for their new blog. Then they go and change the permalink structure. Originally WordPress started with a permalink that looked something like:
http://yourblog.com/post=?79
or similar
then you go and change the format to something like:
http://yourblog.com/2008/the-post-title-here
Which is much prettier and far more likely to help your blog post in the search engines. Which is great - apart from the fact that inevitably those posts have already been indexed or linked from somewhere else. Now when those links are followed a 404 error occurs - which isn’t good.
This plugin uses a 301 (permanent) redirect to the new home of the post, which results in readers and search engines, both finding the post you wanted them to find - no more 404 errors for this. Which is brilliant!
Now, I have already had some people tell me that this plugin is no longer needed as WP 2.5 automatically creates a fancy permalink for you (which thanks to some real foresight in WP Towers we can even edit!). This is true - it does. But how many of us started our blogging journey BEFORE version 2.5?
LOTS!
As such - this plugin will make sure that any changes you make or are made for you still do not result in 404 errors. Originally the intended plan seemed to be to use this plugin to prevent the trailing slash content duplication problem (http://blog.com/post and http://blog.com/post/), which is perfectly valid - but it does all of the above too!
Simply upload it to your plugins folder, activate it and cross one more thing off your worry list. Lovely!
I have run out of coffee - fancy buying me one? Tags: BEFORE, blog, content, cross, default, dozen, duplication, engine, enthusiasm, error, fact, folder, foresight, format, home, journey, link, list, LOTS, Lovely, page, PERMA-LINK, permalink, plan, plugin, post, problem, Review, search, slash, something, structure, thing, Towers, upload, version, Wordpress
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