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…

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

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.

Any idea what’s caueing this?
thank you!

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.!!

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….

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!

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

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.

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