WordPress Plugin: Redirection

One of the side-effects of my recent migration to WordPress (though not really its fault) was that I altered the locations of a number of important pages and resources (e.g. bulletins and sermons).  Goggle has been hammering me for broken links so I needed to do something or else Google was going demote my site substantially (it has already taken some hits on the page rank). I could have fixed everything with some mod_rewrite rules but I was having a couple of problems getting them working on my host and I accidentally ran into the Redirection WordPress plugin from John Godley over at Urban Giraffe.

Using the Redirection plugin I was able to easily write a couple (ok six) simple regex expressions and fix the majority of 404 failures I was receiving.  I’m waiting now for Google to remove some more of its reported 404 errors (down to 33 from 50+ a couple weeks ago) before I decide what more I’m going to do.

Since we all run into this type of problem when doing major site renovations I see where this plugin could be an important resource to have around.

9-Jan-2009 Update: As of today I’m down to three broken links in Google and those are all bad and pending being removed from Google completely.  This plugin has been singularly helpful in correcting the broken links Google was running into.

Tags: 404s, mod_rewrite, redirects