Disusage note
Inasmuch as all the Movable Type entries from 9/06 through 9/08 have been imported into this WordPress install, and since most of the search engines have gotten around to getting the new stuff, I’ve deleted the MT archives from that period. My apologies if you’ve bookmarked something therein and can’t find it now.
Incidentally, this seems like a good time to praise the WebFTP client used by my host: it disposed of the entire directory at one fell swoop in less than half a minute. Had I used my usual FTP client, I’d have been at it all night.
CGHill »
9 November 2008 · 10:13 am
Since I don’t like 404s any more than the next guy, I spent part of last night installing redirects on every index file that used to be in the BACKLOG directory — about seventy of them, some for monthly archives, some for category archives — which ought to catch the majority of thwarted Web surfers. I’ve also installed a search function on the 404 page, along with links to the archives here. (My old semi-comical 404 page had to be retired, alas.)
McGehee »
9 November 2008 · 12:47 pm
If you like, and if your server supports it, I could write .htaccess redirect rules for all of those files and e-mail the result to you, so that search engines won’t keep indexing the redirect pages. I’ll just need the old and new URLs for each post.
CGHill »
9 November 2008 · 1:08 pm
I don’t think it’s necessary, really. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d have a redirect for each of those 4,061 posts, but this isn’t going to happen for perfectly obvious reasons. Besides, Google in particular seems to prefer to send up one of those index pages rather than the individual post, perhaps because there are more links to the index. The people who are most likely to get 404ed are the ones following old trackbacks and/or old links I got from other blogs during the 25 months in question. I am loath to send new trackbacks — in fact, I have installed a gizmo to prevent old posts from generating new trackbacks — but in practice, they don’t yield many readers anyway.
And the actual redirect pages installed in BACKLOG are now excluded in robots.txt, so as the site is recrawled, there’s a good chance that the old references will fall into automated desuetude as the new ones are phased in.
McGehee »
9 November 2008 · 2:35 pm
Cool.
Personally, I hate to see Google search results pointing to index pages on my site. Except for the ones that are for a specific month that has passed, the content on any index URL on my site is a constantly moving target.
Or would be, if I were still generating content, like, at all.