Thanks Brian. That’s another solution to add to the list!

The ‘effect’ of mucked up permalinks seems to be due to a variety of causes. Mine seemed to be solved by un-ticking the two WordPress options that I mentioned here. I’m still not sure if that was the reason as several things happened at once – but my permalinks work fine now, which is the main thing for me…. I must get into the actual code a bit more and trace this stuff through. But it’s a time thing…

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So, search for rewrite in your apache config file, and enable it. Worked wonders for me, however… your mileage may vary.

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I’ve tried to go through your site. I only use WordPress as my ‘thing’ so my knowledge is confined to that. Correct me if I’m wrong…

• It looks like your site is constructed somewhere else using a different tool.
• You have separate forum & eShop software in use as well
• The ‘Blog’ folder is the root of your WordPress installation.
• This is because I can’t see any WordPress files in any other folder

With that in mind, I’ve checked your sitemap.xml and your robots.txt One thing IMMEDIATELY hit me from your sitemap.
You have a lot of pictures locked into a location such as this:

http://www.myrideisme.com/FullImage/f51985d5a3f683a83795b54c88372fc0.jpg/234/

This seems very odd! Weirdly, it takes me to a valid (very big) picture, and if I trim off the /234/ , there’s no picture even though it should be! All there is, is a picture placemarker. Now it gets really weird…
Right-click the placemarker and check the ‘picture’ properties….. It says the path is:

http://www.myrideisme.com/stored_public/member_pic//f51985d5a3f683a83795b54c88372fc0.jpg

I think, although I’m not an expert, that you have some redirection going on. It’s turning /FullImage/ into /stored_public/member_pic//

So I’d check through that for starters!

AS for resetting permalinks, this only applies to your WordPress, which, as I said, appears to be only rooted in the /blog/ folder. Resetting is a simple matter. You just whack them back to the defaults so that your links look like:

http://www.myrideisme.com/Blog/?p=42

You do this from the WordPress admin page here:
Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks -> default
That’s it. Yours is probably located here:
http://www.myrideisme.com/Blog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

Saying that, you have a custom front-end for registrations and login and there are redirects on those as well so I reckon it’s all tied up in that. I have WordPress right in my root and everything cascades off that. I’ve no experience of integrating lots of stuff like you’ve done. I DO know that you have to be careful (a bit late to say that now, I know)

Also, your shop at http://marketplace.myrideisme.com/ is in a sub-domain. You get weird effects with this I’ve heard when using .htaccess and doing redirects. So you need to read up on that – it could be that you’ve some interaction.

Sorry I can be of any more use. It may have given you some pointers though.

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Any idea what’s caueing this?
thank you!

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Check mine:

http://strangelyperfect.tv/robots.txt

any WELL-BEHAVED robot will look at this and do as it’s told. The long string of folders aren’t real – they are added as the early translation plugins I used to use gave multiple SEO hits which is bad.

You can have multiple sitemaps in your root (or anywhere actually) as long as they are unique paths. Google itself has several in it’s root.

In essence, all you need for yourself is:

Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /none/

This should work. If you’ve any private-ish folders you don’t want trawled by a robot, add it to the list like I did. A full path isn’t absolutely necessary for a folder – just make sure you’ve got the trailing ‘/’

Try this link and follow throughs for info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard

As your 404s are from Google and it’s a well-behaved robot, they should stop.

…I think!

If you recheck the sitemaps pluging tick box, it’ll overwrite your nice robots.txt with it’s own… This is bad.!!

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you’re saying – untick “Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file.” and this should all go away.

Excuse the delay while I pick myself up of the floor….

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I forgot… there is one thing;

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
User-agent: *
Disallow: /none/

This means you had a tick box checked in the Google Sitemaps plugin. Untick it. It’s not needed. Google is very well behaved and looks for the standard naming conventions without being told. The ‘disallow’ bit should be enough to stop the current 404s. Add the path to the sitemap to the robots.txt file manually – it’s not a big deal; and you only need to do it once.

If a robot is badly behaved, then it deserves all the 404s it can get!

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I found a ’smart 404′ plugin, which seems to be a kind of redirect, so will play with that as well…

I’d rather be marketing :)

Sandy

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I don’t use the plugin currently, but I used ‘Dean’s Permalinks Migration‘ to good effect when I needed it. Be sure to look for the 1.1-gx version as the original has an issue… Read about it here and the download link is here (as a zip) on George’s site. George has left a good description of this here. The one on WordPress is the duff one!

Have a look for ‘Permalinks Redirection’ or something. There are quite a few other plugins that do the same job. I’ve tried a few in the past but some had ‘issues’, probably with other plugins. I do a mix-and-match approach and am quite ruthless with stuff that wastes too much of my time experimenting – after I’ve had a bit of a play, of course. One is discussed here that looks promising…

As for the htaccess approach. Look for ‘htaccess 301 redirect’ or something in Google – there’s oodles of info. From your sitemap, you’ve about 40 pages so you could easily code each page individually. Here’s what I did nearly a year ago….

I took out all redirection
I recoded all internal links
I implemented 301 redirects to a few key pages in htaccess

To fix all internal links, I did it semi-manually. I download the whole database using phpADMIN and then searched and replaced key bits of string in a text editor. When all the links were done, I uploaded the new database. It took less than an hour. It means I don’t need a plugin as I’m happy with my new permalink structure. A tiny bit in htaccess does the rest and anyway, any duff links are in really old posts, some of my early posts were crap and no-one looks at them so no harm if they’re knackered.

You don’t have to do this, of course. Use a plugin, change your permalinks structure and any future postings will pick up the new structure. Only you can choose what’s best. It may be that you are coming to the end of entries in this website so minimal work needs to be done. If you can see your post count increasing by an order of magnitude or two (i.e. 10-100 times), then you have to make a cool decision soon that you can live with.

Of course, all the knowledge you pick up you can use when setting up and maintaining other websites! Good luck.

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How do you get google to redirect for a permalink structure change?
Thanks for your time and interest, much appreciated to find a fix even if we don’t know the cause :)

Sandy Kumskov

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@Sandy

An interesting quest indeed.

My gut feeling is to think out of the box after the trouble I had.
First, make sure you’ve unticked the WordPress options I mentioned.
Second, have a look at your plugin options. I don’t know what you use but the only things that do the ACTION that you are noticing are SEO/Tag?/image type plugins that stick “Nofollow” after everything.

Obviously this isn’t exactly the same but you are getting text appended to a link…. think about it. There could be a setting you’ve flipped recently or you’ve tried a new plugin. There could be interactions between plugins also.

When you try to trace this stuff, it’s imperative to empty every cache you can find and turn off all the mechanisms. I got confused by my ISP’s caching once or twice… it’s goes weird sometimes and serves old pages and randomly blocks domains…

Any plugins like this I’d re-install using ‘FTP’. Things can go odd just sat on the server, I’ve found.

Translator plugins do something similar as well and make a folder for each language for SEO reasons. I’ve blocked this behaviour in htaccess and the robots.txt file when I’ve used them. Maybe you could do the same. You need to use a special string to get it right. Certainly the robots.txt is easy to do with wildcards and Google (which has 90% of the search market) adheres to the sitemap standards. At least you won’t lose SEO rank.

..I’ve just checked your robots file. Try this:

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
Sitemap: http://sandykumskov.com/sitemap.xml.gz
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
User-agent: *
Disallow: /none/

This will tell Google NOT to look in any folder called ‘none’ and so hopefully it won’t go there to return a 404! – it still doesn’t explain what’s doing it, but it mitigates the effect.

Finally, your permalink structure really needs another variable in it for clarity. That’s why I stuck the postid in mine.

Finally (yes really this time), don’t forget you can use htaccess or plugins to do redirects for you if you change your permalink structure. This way you don’t lose your traffic and rankings.

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It does seem to have happened after I did the upgrade to 2.7. I’ve checked my other websites as well, same deal. I fiddled about with deactivating plugins and so on, posted on the wordpress forum, changed templates etc. Someone on a forum yesterday suggested there might be a problem with my permalink structure – it just says /%postname%/ in the custom field, which is the same as it’s been for many months I believe.

If I type in any url, or click on any link on the blog, all pages work. It’s “just” the incoming links that are the problem :)

So I’m wondering if you’d looked at your own log files and noticed the 404s, and if it was the same problem as mine?

I’m not game to change my permalinks back to default because of the great traffic I’ve built over the last months – but then again, if that traffic is mostly getting 404s, no harm done I suppose….

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Also, the top folder name (2009) overlaps your permalink structure. So some confusion could arise there.

The two plugins I use and mentioned earlier work the way I want for me. For NextGen, I let it make a folder and then FTP 1-200 pix at a go into it (to get past the 2Mb upload limit, this is the best way). NG then has lots of optiopns to make thumbs & add tags etc. Either Albums, Galleries or individual pictures can be inserted into a post or page from the toolbar.
Image Manager works in a similar way but only on 1 pic at a time but it does have a neat thumbnail & popup generation all in one go. You can go up and down the file structure looking for pix as well.

In future, I may set both plugins to a master “images” folder in wp-content. Not yet though. When I have time!

BTW, how may posts/pix have you if you had to manually edit each page & post entry on your website? If it’s less than 50-100 with (say) 4 pix per page, it’d probably take an afternoon to manually do the changes. In this case, I’d MOVE ALL your pix to a sensible folder structure with a root of “images” say, and then use a link checker to set each picture manually because they seem to be in a bit of a jumble.

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I decided to check your image locations. Now bear with me, because I don’t use WordPress’s way of doing things – storing uploads and pictures in a folder heirarchy and especially the new method of mixing all the various picture sizes together… The reason for this is that I use the ImageManager plugin. This has had it’s ups and downs since I first installed it ages ago. But it means that the multi-image way that WordPress does stuff, I don’t use, although some other sites I look after do things that way. I also know that WordPress changed their way of handling pictures a couple of version points back. This again, passed me by because I don’t use it.
These are two support posts I’ve found: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/190467 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/166622 You get the idea.

If I take the top image, it’s link points to http://www.galleryuccs.org/upcoming_exhibits/2009/2009_faculty-2 and the picture location is at http://www.galleryuccs.org/2008/i/2009_faculty_sm.jpg
The problems for me are the little “i” folder….. What’s that all about? Also, as you say, the small picture is in the /2008/ folder root instead of the /2009/. Also, you have the pictures’ folder all in the root. The normal place to stuff your pictures etc is in the wp-content folder and sub-folder down from that. I think I remember reading somewhere that WordPress needs to be told the content folder if it’s not in the default place – the wp-config file probably. There are some admin screen settings too.

My experience is not to muck about with the defaults too much for WordPress. As far as I can see, your permalink structure is okay. If your WP install is in your root, I should move all the images to http://www.galleryuccs.org/wp-content/. For myself, I use NextGEN gallery which makes a sub-folder called /gallery/ and all my other pictures go in /uploads/. The ImageManager plugin makes an /image/ folder inside /uploads/ as well, and then a /.thumbs/ folder inside that for the thumbnails. These are the defaults but they can be changed from the plugin admin screen.
That’s my site. I don’t know if you are doing the same sort of thing, but I’d certainly check out the config pointers for WordPress. The new method of picture generation must be pretty dependant on this. It looks to me that it’s confused somehow and is spraying the pictures around using some sort of memory setting that’s wrong.

Various posters have suggested there’s no automatic way to move from one picture structure to another – well I’ve done it! Semi-automatically.

Being a born twiddler, I’ve tried lots of WP plugins, pictures and otherwise. There is NO consistent way of doing images. Thumbnails, folders – the lot. Always different, plugins and even WordPress. What I HAVE done is to re-assign all the links when I’ve made a structural change to the image folders and setups to get back to the way it was… How?

Install the Maintenance Mode plugin and set it off for a few hours!
Download your WP database using phpAdmin to your desktop. Use the DROP TABLE setting.
Make a copy of the file – in case you muck it up!
Now decide on a folder structure for your images.
COPY them into the new structure (you can delete all the old structure once it’s up and working). Use your FTP or host’s software.
Now open your database on your desktop with a text editor – I use Editor2 from http://www.zabkat.com Notepad’s okay at a pinch, but it’s slow in comparison. The database is actually plain text. Don’t use MSWord or anything like that. Plain text, that’s all.
It looks awful as all the code is jumbled up with the data structure. Don’t worry, this works. I’ve done it. Twice!
Now find some commonality to do a find and replace for your old folder patterns to your new ones. Remember, that a is text too! This can help to nail down some unique text strings to find & replace on.
Start at the top of the file (you’ll have megabytes of text here). Once you are confident that you’re picking up the data correctly and it’s getting replaced into your new file-paths, set it away to “Replace All”. This will take a few seconds. Minutes with notepad.
Now repeat for all the various gross structural changes you are going to make to the folder’s names etc. Start at the top of the file each time. You don’t want to lose your place!

Once done, upload your new, modified database file to your WP database using phpAdmin again for the import. You’ll have set it initially to DROP TABLE so it’ll wipe out your old database and replace it with the new.
Switch off maintenance mode and see if it’s worked. You may have a few manual tweaks to do. Use a link checker like the Broken Link Checker plugin or something like Xenu’s Link Sleuth to check the whole website for duff links. (You should do this periodically to check for Link Rot anyway).

This sounds a lot, but I have over 2000 posts in this website with about 300 ’standard’ pix and thousands of gallery pix. It took me an hour or two last time. I mucked it up once and uploaded the orginal database and started again. A sort of poor-mans roll-back. So if you looked at an early post of mine like http://strangelyperfect.tv/74/don-martin/ it has a picture located at http://strangelyperfect.tv/wp-content/uploads/the_paleontologist_don_martin.jpg and the thumbnail is at http://strangelyperfect.tv/wp-content/uploads/.thumbs/.the_paleontologist_don_martin.jpg
- But it hasn’t always been like this! I originally had stuff straight in the ‘uploads’ folder and the post would have been called http://strangelyperfect.tv/?p=74 All the changes (and some!) were all manual find and replaces using the method above. Looking at the post now, it could do with the www removing as well. Missed that!

This may or may not help you. But I’m pretty sure it’s not a permalinks problem.

Oh! I’ve just remembered as this was so long winded; check the folder permissions on the picture folders. They should be 705 or 755. Something like that. If you’ve got the 2009 one as 111 or something low like that, WordPress can’t write to it. Check that there isn’t an invisible .htaccess blocking jpgs or something as well. Depending on your FTP/host software, there may be some settings to show hidden files and extra attributes. Any file that starts with a . is hidden.

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Last year the galleryuccs.org site couldn’t find post image links, but then it could if you changed the date for the post. Seemed like an odd work-around by the old administrator, but easy enough.

Then, the 2009 folder I made that has this year’s images for shows was and still is impossible to find by wordpress.
The site uses the custom link formula of %category%/%year%/%postname%.

Also, on the post I’m trying to make where only name of the post’s text shows up instead of the image, I copied the image location, and for the thumbnail it used the 2008 folder, and for the full-size it used the 2007 folder.

Try it for yourself, using either one of the upcoming Exhibits (lower left part of home page).

I’d be grateful for a solution, my .htaccess page is fine, btw.

Millie

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