Once you have a site with good, clean URLs, the next step is to make sure they never change. It’s a simple mantra to have, but a tough one to follow through on.
You see, sometimes you have to change URLs. A new content management system might demand a certain structure. You might be improving your organization to have site sections. Heck, your wacky Web Developer might be changing programming languages.
In that case, make sure the old pages remain immortal. Don’t just redirect pages not found to the home page. That’s a cop out. Go to the effort of determining every broken page on your site and make sure it redirects to the new page. This is a lot of work, but both users and search engines like it.
When I switched from Blogger to WordPress, there were all sorts of changes. The whole URL structure changed, which breaks my immortal URL rule. That meant I needed to do some extra work to make sure that the Blogger URLs were not forgotten and that they found their way to the new structure.
The solution was permanent redirects on the server. I have about 100 lines in my .htaccess file that look like this:
Redirect permanent /news/2005/07/trailboss-best-band-that-never-was.html https://adamduvander.com/me/trailboss-the-best-band-that-never-was
Just a couple weeks ago I decided that my Weird Al CD post was more about me than keeping things simple. I switched its category, which changed the URL. Then I made sure the old, broken one would remain immortal by redirecting it.
If your server uses Apache (and most do), check out their docs for more information.
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