A week or two ago, I fiddled around a bit with the inner workings of this blog, as I do from time to time. In trying to improve the search-engine-friendliness of the site, I made a few changes to the permalink structure in Wordpress, but after a couple minutes I changed it back and forgot all about it.
Turns out Google had a big PageRank refresh over the weekend and I went from PageRank 4 down to PageRank 3. In trying to find an explanation for the drop, I realized that a large part of the site content was unreachable and generating 404 Not Found errors. Between upgrading WordPress and messing with the permalinks, the URL rewriting got hosed, which made nearly every post unreachable.
After much lamentation and gnashing of teeth, I did some research and found a nice solution in the form of the Wordpress Permalink Redirect Plugin, which would resolve the issue and also help redirect some even older broken permalinks.
Now, all I need to do is keep blogging every day until I get back into Google’s good graces.
[...] little to nothing on that front. For a while there I was blogging only about once a month, which has not helped my relationship with Google, my coy mistress. Life has intervened, but I would be lying if I said I could never find time to [...]