If you are blogging for a while you know that your site won’t stay the same for full time. You can change permalinks of full web site or just link of particular blog post or maybe you’ll move your blog from subdomain to new domain or otherwise. In any case with the time the changes of your blog structure will be made.
It happened to me and not once. So I thought it good idea to use one of juice keeper plugins for my wordpress blog. The idea of these plugins looks very good:
It redirects all non-existing URLs which normally return a 404 error to the blog front page using 301 (permanent) redirect. This way everyone who comes to your blog via broken link (both people and robots) will be redirected to the front page.
So if you made changes to permalink of your blog post and some body is trying to reach old url, instead of seeing 404 error
By this plugin they will be forwarded to home page
It comes with price which I don’t want to pay any more, but it took me some time to realise it. This plugin would be perfect if I would write my blog only for search engines. You changed your content, search engine robot comes, it finds 301 redirect to your home page and is happy with that. There are no errors, no warnings.
What about real person? Will be (s)he also happy by redirect to home page instead of page (s)he was looking for? I don’t think so. I was thinking about myself what would I do? I most likely would close that page and I would go back to the next website on my search result list.
But I don’t want to lose visitors like and I started to use Redirection plugin instead of juice keeper to fix it. What it does? This plugin logs all 404 errors
and then you go through that list and manually add redirection for each no found page.
Now it will be forwarded to correct page instead of forwarding to home page which can be meaningless for a visitor.
Just don’t forget uncheck “log redirected requests” in plugin options to avoid get logged urls you already fixed and forwarded to proper permalink.
It can take some time to catch all urls which give 404 errors, but I think it worth effort and user will get better impression of your site.
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