Problem Solved w/ WordPress Redirect Plugin

November 19, 2010 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

I love WordPress. Whenever you run into an issue, most likely someone else has run into it first and solved it for you. The power of crowdsourcing at its best.

Case in point. I was working on a client’s wordpress site. It was an old half configured blog that needed some TLC. Since there wasn’t going to be a lot of pages, I changed the permalink structure to a custom one so I could put keywords into the URLs. I checked whether the site had any backlinks (it didn’t) so I figured I could change the URL structure to it .. no problem. After all, I had set up a sitemap generation plugin so the search engines would be informed of the new URLs, what could go wrong?

Weeks later, I’m noticing that both Bing and Google STILL had the old URLs indexed. Google had indexed all the new ones, but had several of the old ones. And Bing, it hadn’t even found most of the new ones.

Site: Command in Bing

The above excerpt is from typing in site:yourholidayfeast.com into Bing. You can do this with Google as well. This command is a way to see what pages of your site the Search Engines have indexed. It’s a very handy little command.

So obviously these old pages were around to stay for a while. And since these old URLs would get a 404 error, this was not good, a bad experience for the user that might get a bogus result from Google or Bing, and bad for making my client’s site nice and tidy and crawlable for the Search Engines. I needed a way to 301 Redirect these old URLs to the new keyword rich custom permalink URLs.

A 301 Redirect is a way to return a HTTP status code to the requester (whether it be Google or your browser) saying that the URL has permanently changed to a new one. Everyone gets to the new page, any link juice gets passed along and everyone is happy. So I went to “Add New” in the Plugin menu in WordPress and typed in “301 Redirect” in the search … and to my happy surprise I had tons of plugins to choose from.

I picked one called “SS Old URLs” that looked straightforward and close to what I wanted. When I installed it, it wasn’t too clear about how to configure the redirects, but it turns out that (good thing there was a readme) it had added a new menu item in the Settings menu called “Old URLs”. Then it got easy. Using the site: results listing in Bing (and Google) I just typed in the old URL (minus the domain name) and then found the new equivalent and typed that in. Here is what it looks like after I typed in a few:

Adding Redirects with SS Old URLs plugin

Note the nice to have of adding the redirects to your. htaccess file. This involves downloading this file and editing it and uploading (unless you have shell access to your hosting server). Still not too much work so that’s my next step.

Oh, and the client site? It’s a site that helps you plan your holiday events and holiday party meals. If you are one of those hostess types, check it out.

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Four Essential WordPress Plugins

September 12, 2010 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

If you are a blogger with your own hosted WordPress site, consider installing these WordPress plugins:

  • Akismet Run, don’t walk, to install this plugin. In fact in most brand new WordPress installs, you should see this plugin already in your Plugins dashboard, ready to be activated. This plugin does a great job of filtering out spam comments on your blog .. it’s really painful to delete these comments by hand. The one trick, is that you will have to create an account at wordpress.com to obtain your WordPress API Key. However once you have that, you will be able to activate Akismet
  • All-in-One-SEO For more control over your page title and meta tags: see my earlier post on title tags and a pointer to this plugin
  • Google Analytics This doesn’t have to be a plugin as you can update the footer.php code directly with the Google Analytics tracking code, however there are several plugins available. I installed Yoast’s plugin and it was straightforward. With this, you should set up your google analytic account first. If you think you will need help, I would suggest watching the YouTube videos on the topic, just search on “google analytics wordpress plugin video” and browse through them until you find one that makes sense to you. Why do you want to install this plugin? So that you have information about the visitors to your site, what keywords they use … etc. Don’t worry about if you don’t understand google analytics at first. The important thing is to start the analytics tracking now, so you can look at your blog’s performance trends in the future.
  • Google XML Sitemaps This plugin will help Google crawl your blog (and help Google discover it in the first place!). It creates a list of your blog posts and pages in a special format that Google likes (called XML) and updates it when you change or updates your blog. With this plugin, you MAY need to know how to create and change permissions on a file on your server, (usually done through a FTP client such as Filezilla). Another cool thing, which I plan to cover more in a future post, is that it helps with eliminating duplicate content. Instructions and download for Google XML Sitemap Plugin. You may be also able to install it directly from your wordpress config panel (Add New Plugin).

Update: March 4, 2013: These plugins are all still valid. I’ve published a more extensive list of WordPress plugins critical for SEO that you might want to check out as well.

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AddThis simple way to share your blog

March 30, 2010 / Social Media / by Kathy Alice

There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.

Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.

AddThis widget ready code is dead simple
AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog
It’s so dead simple, you can’t help but to just do it. As long as your wordpress theme is widget aware, all you have to do is cut and paste HTML code into a Text Widget that you drag and drop to your sidebar. The step by step instructions are right there on the AddThis web page. The simplicity of the user experience is something that should be strived for by all webdesigners.

You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.

AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.

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