Is your blog more than few months old?

Have you ever changed your permalink URL structure?

Have you ever deleted some posts, or moved some pages around?

If you answered yes to any of these, then your blog will almost certainly have some broken links – a potential visitor will click on a search engine result linking to your blog, and instead of reading your article, or at worst seeing the homepage of your blog, will see the ’404′ page along the lines of:

‘Sorry, the information you are looking for is no longer here.’

I’m willing to bet that 99% of those visitors who see your 404 will just hit ‘back’ to Google and try a different search result. It would be far better if you could either:

• Fix the broken link.
• If the old page has gone, re-direct the visitor to another, relevant, post.
• Or send them to a page of your choice, like your homepage.

This can be achieved, as some of you may know, via 301 or 302 re-directs, but how do you do this? How do you know which links are broken in the first place?

The Redirection Plugin

As ever if you’re on WordPress, the answer is simple, just download the Redirection plugin, upload to your blog and activate it. There are many powerful features to this plugin, but the simplest and most useful is simply the fact that it will log all 404 errors, including what the visitor was looking for, and where they came from. Then, all within the plugin, you can setup a permanent 301 re-direct on the broken link, to a page of your choice. The next time a visitor follows a broken or outdated link from a search engine, they will seamlessly be sent to the redirected page without even noticing.

Of course you don’t have to wait for a 404 error before you act, if you know of a broken link, or if you’d like to alter the URL of an existing post, you can go ahead, knowing that you can setup a simple 301 redirection in seconds using this plugin.

This is extra useful when coupled with my discovery of the WordPress Post Slug: I was asked by Catherine in a comment:

Does this only work if used before publishing? Or can you make the change after publishing and get the same affect?

Now you can change the Post Slug on existing posts, to give them more search engine friendly URL’s and then simply set up a re-direct on the old URL to retain all your incoming links – without the redirect, changing the post slug would have led to another 404 error.

Is it worth changing your old posts? Definitely, using the post slug has given me the ability to have post titles for humans and post URLs for search engines, and it makes a real difference – look at the Google results for ‘wordpress post slug’

Check Your Links

This plugin is excellent, and the log of 404 errors will prove very useful, but it’s best to be proactive – make sure you have a free account at Google Webmaster tools, and upload a sitemap while you’re there. Once Google has spidered you, they will report any broken 404 links, and you can then fix them with this plugin.

The older your blog, the more chance of having broken links you have, and without putting a redirect in place, changing any of your URLs would be traffic suicide. Thanks to this plugin, it’s now a simple thing to fix and monitor in future.