Can I keep a breaking link active?
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While I regularly post new material, much of my material is old. I published it in some form years ago. For example, a report I wrote on the weather for November 2009 was printed locally in early December that year. As a rule, I post such items with a date stamp close to when they were originally written, rather than using the default “now” date stamp.
A few of these items, ones that I thought were more interesting, I date-stamped “now”. I intended to change the date stamp to an original date later, when the post had fallen off the front page.
I discovered that changing the date stamp on a post caused any links to it to break. For my readers, I found I could repair my own links to the post, but I cannot see how to repair links already made by others (e.g.by google search).
Is there some way that I can re-direct a link that I will be breaking in this way?
I think that I can avoid this problem in future by a using a different tactic. As I prepare posts with historic date stamps, I can make the most interesting ones “sticky” so I can keep them on the front page for a few days before sending them to the dungeons.
Would that idea work?The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi, in general it’s not a good idea to change the URL of a post once it’s been published, since other sites will link to the post’s original URL, and there’s no way for you to change those links directly. You can contact the site owners and ask them to change it, but they might not.
In the future, your idea to set the more interesting posts as sticky sounds like a good one to me. It would avoid the URL changing, but still display the post prominently for awhile.
There are two options you could use to fix the posts that are currently broken:
1) Change the posts back to their original URL, and then change all of the links on your site to point to the original URL.
2) Leave the posts where the are, but create new posts with the original URLs, and have the new posts link to the corresponding post.
I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions, or if there’s anything else I can do.
Ian -
Thanks, Ian.
For the two or three where I re-set the date to an earlier time. I would like to use your Option 2.
I presume I would create a mainly empty post, with a re-direction note.
However, I have no idea how to find the original URL. How is that done?
I must say that either wordpress or google (I don’t know which) is quite clever at re-direction. I found my header image on google with a direcion to this URL:
http://climatebysurly.com/category/manilla-monthly-weather/It showed a part of my home page, saying that the page in question could not be found, but with suggestions that would probably find it (whatever page it was).
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In order to find which websites on the Internet are linking to pages on your site that don’t exist, you can setup Google Webmaster Tools, which is a free 3rd-party service. Instructions for that are at http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
Once it’s setup, you can log in to Webmaster Tools and view the crawl errors (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/crawl-errors-next-generation.html) to get a list of broken links.
Please let me know if you have any questions, or if there’s anything else I can do.
Ian -
Thanks, Ian.
On the “Tools” page of my website, “Website Verification Services” already has a code inserted in the field “Google Webmaster Tools”.
I have a record that I registered my site with Google on 1 May 2014.
I am in difficulty.
I registered with Google+ using my real name and registered this website.
When I found that Google had converted the name publicly displayed on my website from my pseudonym to my real name, I panicked. I was not prepared to do that, and I removed this website from my registration.
Now, when I log in to webmaster central, there does not seem to be any option for me to access the broken links facility that you mentioned.
Is that the case? -
This is probably because the connection has been removed. If you reconnect it again using these instructions you should be able to see the broken links list again: http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/#google-webmaster-tools
When I found that Google had converted the name publicly displayed on my website from
We probably don’t have much control on this because Google might be pulling information from your Google+ account but out of curiosity, where did you exactly see this happen?
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“out of curiosity, where did you exactly see this happen?”
I don’t really understand this but, when I have edited a post, and clicked “View Post”, the view I get has “posted by surly bond” at the top, following the names of the categories. In normal viewing of the site, there are no “by” lines on the posts. I presume that is because i am the only one posting. Is that how it is supposed to work?
Anyway, the day that I activated my “Google+” account, the “by” line on new posts that I “viewed” had my real name. I don’t know under what circumstances these “by” lines appear. Can you tell me?
Is there any place on (or linked to) my WordPress.com website where I can expect my Google+ registered name to appear? If there isn’t, then I don’t mind linking the website to my Google+ registration. -
I see. That’s just how your theme works. It only show the author name when viewing individual posts pages like: http://climatebysurly.com/2014/06/07/autumn-2014-cloudy-with-warm-nights/
You can change the name displayed on your posts and comments by changing the “display name” on your Personal Settings admin panel:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/change-your-username/#change-display-name-nicknameYou can watch a video showing how to change your display name here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/change-your-username/#change-display-name-nicknameAnyway, the day that I activated my “Google+” account, the “by” line on new posts that I “viewed” had my real name. I don’t know under what circumstances these “by” lines appear. Can you tell me?
Is there any place on (or linked to) my WordPress.com website where I can expect my Google+ registered name to appear? If there isn’t, then I don’t mind linking the website to my Google+ registration.That’s odd. That ‘by’ byline only pulls information from your WordPress.com profile. If you have Google+ set up and see your real name appear again then let me know so I can take a closer look at it.
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