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More on Permalinks


Friday, August 21st, 2009

Permalinks are now finalized to use the form “ht…am.org/politics/apologies-100/”. For just a short time, they were set to use the form “ht…am.org/politics/apologies/”. I found a way to use both forms of permalinks at the same time.

When I finally figured out and fixed what had been the cause of the categories links being broken, the Migration feature of the Advanced Permalinks plugin was left unused. So I used it to allow permalinks of the form “ht…am.org/politics/apologies/” to have a 301 redirect to the now-finalized permalink structure, “ht…am.org/politics/apologies-100/”.

Only one minor hitch…the plugin “Link Juice Keeper” intercepts the link in the shorter form and does its own 301 redirect to the home page of the blog, effectively disabling the Advanced Permalinks redirect. What is “Link Juice Keeper”? Glad you asked!

When talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there is something SEO “experts” call “Link Juice.” “Link Juice” is mostly a count of how many other websites link into your website, and the importance of the sites that have those links. It helps Google and the other Search Engine Big Boys decide how important your website is, and thus, it affects how near the top of a given search your website will show up. If a link to some inside page of your website is broken, Google penalizes your website slightly. Causes of a broken link might include things like the page is no longer there, the location of it was changed, the webmaster of the site linking to yours made a mistake when setting up the link, or any of a zillion other reasons.

“Link Juice Keeper” does a 301 redirect of ANY link to an inside page of your website that is not found, so that the home page will be displayed in its place. Thus, the search engine spiders do NOT see a broken link to your website. So, for instance, if you typed “ht…am.org/win-a-million-rubles” into your web browser, there is no “win-a-million-rubles” page on “ht…am.org/” and Link Juice Keeper would redirect your browser (and the search engine spiders) to the home page.

So I can use one or the other, but not both.

Which to use? Decisions, decisions. Probably, Advanced Permalinks will lose because there are very few, if any, links using the “numberless” form of permalinks outside the blog itself. There are other ways to make the few links within John’s Joint articles that use it to still get the right post, and any of the 4-billion+ websites on the Internet can potentially have links that point to non-existant pages on John’s Joint.

Marv

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