Last week Blogstorm moved over to Wordpress and I spent a considerable amount of time making sure everything went smoothly and all the old urls were 301 redirected to the new urls. During the move I decided to move from using blogstorm.co.uk/blog/post-title/ to a new permalink structure of blogstorm.co.uk/post-title/.
The reason for this was because Google seemed to be giving more weight to pages in my /blog/ folder and I wanted to make sure all the pages on my site (such as the SEO consulting page) were given equal weight. Also when Blogstorm first launched last June the tracker was the main feature on the homepage but things have changed and the main focus of the site is now the blog so it makes sense to have this as the homepage.
Having taken the time to redirect all the posts I was amazed to find 70 404 errors in my Google Webmaster Central account today. The errors were caused when Googlebot loaded up trackback urls to my old posts (blogstorm.co.uk/blog/post-title/trackback) which should have been totally impossible since I didn’t have any kind of trackback system on my old CMS. The new permalink system does have /trackback/ at the end of the trackback urls and they 301 back to the original post in the correct manner. Somehow Google added the /trackback/parameter to the old posts, basically making up a load of urls that never previously existed. The fact this had never happened before I installed Wordpress is baffling. Perhaps Wordpress somehow pinged Google with the urls rather than Googe finding any links to them but even this seems strange.
After modifying my htaccess to remove the trackback parameter from the old posts I installed this excellent redirection plugin to take care of some other issues and track future 404 errors. Wordpress seems to be fairly SEO friendly these days in terms of url structure and page titles but it can still cause a lot of headaches, the moral of this story is to track everything even when you think you have carried out a site move perfectly.
If I see any changes in traffic from Google after the move to Wordpress I will post the results.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
Read some similar posts
- The best of Blogstorm so far
- Secure Server Online Backup for Wordpress
- Important: Don’t use Crawl Rate Tracker & Wordpress 2.5
- Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin for WP2.5 and other cool upgrades
- VAT Cut Implications for Ecommerce Sites in the UK
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Find me on Twitter
Of course another implication is that I had more spam comments in the first few hours on Wordpress than in 18 months blogging with my previous system.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThe exact same thing happened to me a couple of times, the first one years ago, and I’ve started to think that Google probably recognises specific structures and their similarities, and then tacks on different query strings and such to intentionally break them.
Seriously, I’ve never seen so many deliberate 404s in all my days, but I’m pretty sure that if you serve up a Custom 404 page, that has relevant information on it and at least calls attention to your search capabilities, then Google thinks your all good.
I’ve been nothing but happy with all my WP stuff, and there are heaps of plugins out there makes so many things possible.
Good luck amigo.
Hey Patrick, Thanks for the plugin link, was using 404 notifier and adding re-directs to my .htaccess file, now this is a lot easier!
There are a lot of plugins to deal with the Spam and I guess it’s just a fact that it’s going to be around for ever.
With the /trackback/ and /feed/ added on to the end of each URL would you think it’s best to 301 them to the actual URL or would it be just as good to deny them in robots.txt like */trackback/ ?
Find me on Twitter
If you block them you would lose the benefit of any links pointing to them.
More comments from Patrick AltoftMake sure you install the Akismet plugin to clamp down on comment / trackback spam.
Wordpress is an excellent platform for SEO.
c.
I found that plugin awhile back and after installing it, it served up 302 redirects instead of 301’s.
I checked your older posts and they are all giving a 301 so I guess it was just a temporary bug, which is great because the plugin is awesome. I will definitely use it in the future.
In fact all of Urban Giraffe’s plugins are great. http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/
If you are now using Wordpress as your blogging platform why do you not feature a link back to Wordpress?
Though its not compulsory I would have thought that this would have been a courteous thing to do, after all this wonderful piece of software has been provided completely free of charge. Don’t take this personaly though, many (Wordpress) blogs I read never feature a credit or backlink to Wordpress.org.
Am I missing something here, does a link or crediting the blogging platform cause a blogger problems?
Find me on Twitter
Gripper there is a link at the bottom right hand site. It doesn’t have an underline but I can’t see anybody clicking it anyway.
More comments from Patrick AltoftSorry Patrick, I missed that one.
I think my point still stands though, many Wordpress blogs still do not credit the platform that enabled it. Has featuring the link caused anyone any problems (apart from the spam which Chris correctly pointed out earlier can be thwarted by the Askimet plugin)
I wonder if Google to put more weight on posts that are closer to the root directory of the site. eg mysite.com/blog/newzealand/webcam.htm vs mysite.com/webcam.htm. Mmmm…
Find me on Twitter
MSN filed a patent that included details of how content nearer the root would be ranked higher. This was a few years ago before Wordpress made the use of folders more widespread.
I suspect if you get lots of links to content within a certain sub folder Google will give that folder more weight than the rest of the site. It might not be much though.
More comments from Patrick AltoftLeave a Comment (registration is optional)