I just realized as I was looking through the dashboard that I still have inbound links coming to this domain. Duh! I forgot for some reason that wiping out the content on this end doesn’t do anything to the links on the other end. Except maybe break them. Which means I’m going to have to do something about that. Here are my options as I know them.
Ignore them and let people end up on a 404 page
This has a certain appeal to it. Namely if I want to be lazy. Problem is that when people see a 404 page not found error they rarely do anything except leave. Which means it would be wasted traffic. While this idea is the simplest it is also the least effective in terms of building an audience.
Write new posts so that there is content at that location
It’s not hard to do that, but the idea of wiping the database and relaunching ABaN is to start completely over. If I just put new content in the same location as the links lead to it just seems… wrong.
Import the old posts to the new blog
This isn’t much different than writing new content under the same title and location. The problem I see is that it’s old content and once again defeats the purpose of starting over.
Redirect those broken links to an About Me page
Now this is a solution that makes sense to me. I can get the traffic from those links and send it to what is arguably one of the most important pages on a blog. Where I get to talk about myself. Just kidding, but if you don’t know and understand the importance of your About Me page on your blog you should spend sometime learning what it is really about.
Choosing the right redirect
Now that I’ve decided to redirect the broken links to the about me page I need to do some behind the scenes magic. But first I need to determine what kind of redirect I will use. I’m going to chose between a 307 (temporary) redirect and a 301 (permanent) redirect. And the winner is the 301! Why? Because this is a permanent redirect and won’t be returning to the original location. Also it should be noted that there are 8 different server side redirects but the 307 and 301 are by far the most commonly used. At least they are what I most commonly use.
.htaccess magic
In order to redirect I will use the following code in the .htaccess file:
redirect 301 orginal/link/location.html new/link/location.html
Yes, in this case it really is that simple. I could use mod_rewrite but that’s too much work. A mod_rewrite would be a good tool if I wanted to redirect an entire domain. For example suppose I decided I didn’t want to maintain my site about snakes anymore. I could use a mod_rewrite to redirect all traffic going to that domain here. When someone typed in that domain address, pet-snakes.com they would end up here at www.ablogaboutnothing.com. But of course I don’t want to do that because I value that traffic on that domain.
What if I don’t have a .htaccess file?
Not all web servers make use of the .htaccess file and therefore a different method of redirecting will have to be explored if that is the case for you. I won’t get into how to do them but an IIS web server can be redirected by following these directions.
So do you think this is a good idea or is there something else I should do with that traffic?