Six months later, I get everything fixed, (I think)
So, about six months ago, I move the blog to a new subdirectory, and everything breaks.
So I start a voyage of self-discovery on how .htaccess files work in order to fix everything. I figure things out but for some reason beyond my knowledge, I don’t actually implement any of those fixes. Search engines that regularly scrape my pages for content can no longer find my blog, and my traffic drops to almost nothing.
Today I finally fixed things.
The first issue was my root website directory, as many spiders try to scrape my homepage. I created a kludgy html redirect page, but many spiders don’t really like to follow links like that. What I really needed was a 301 redirect, but my attempts to make one using .htaccess were filled with recursive fail.
The solution was a simple php file, placed in my root web directory, called index.php
<?php
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: /blog/");
?>
The second problem was all the links out there on other blogs pointing to my old posts. I tried to use mod.rewrite again, but that only seemed to work when my posts called for an existing but renamed picture or something. When someone followed an external link to say my most popular post ever, my “Zumbo timeline“, they got a 404. To fix those, I had to add the following lines to my htaccess:
Redirect 301 /2005 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2005
Redirect 301 /2006 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2006
Redirect 301 /2007 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2007
I think that fixes everything.
