The plugin works by capturing the 404 before the browser sees it. It then searches your posts and pages to find a good match to the tokens in the url. If someone can’t find http://www.yoursite.com/blog/my-cats it will search the posts for “my” and “cats” and the user is sent to the post that has the highest score. You can either make this a redirect or the plugin can just display the page. Redirects are good because google will remember that it was redirected and update its indexes.
It is best when you change the full url, but keep a similar slug. It tries to match on the slug first and then on key words in the post body. It can also do soundex searches. It does not work on sites that do not have “friendly” urls.
The plugin does not keep lists, instead it does a search whenever there is a 404. I keeps a short log of pages redirected or not found to see what users are trying to view, but not finding.
Keith
Thank you for the quick response and explanation Keith.
I set up this plugin today and I’m amazed by it. I was testing it by purposely mistyping all but two of the slug words into my URL bar, and every time your plugin redirected me to the right page accurately. Really magical, will save me and readers a lot of headaches.
Regarding my question, I understand your explanation but I’m still not sure of your answer.
As I mentioned, I’m changing the slugs on 70 blog posts. Most posts will keep at least two words in common with the old slugs, but some (10-20) won’t.
Permalink finder seems like a great solution for random links that don’t get updated with a revised slug, or other aberrations where a visitor needs an extra push to get to the right page.
It doesn’t seem at to me like the best solution for methodically replacing 70 old blog post slugs with new slugs and 301 redirects specifically for those pages, since it doesn’t allow me to create a redirect for each slug, maintain a redirect list, etc.
So for large 301 redirect projects, it seems like I still need to install another redirect plugin as a companion to it that will transfer specific pages to new specific slugs.
Is that accurate, or am I misunderstanding something?
Thanks –
Andy
You only need a list type plugin for cases where the permalink finder does not work. It is pretty good, as you found out, in finding posts where the slug has changed. If you keep the same or nearly the same title, the plugin will always find the right page or post.
Keith
Gotcha. Unfortunately the vast majority of mine have major slug changes so I’ll compliment this with another 301 redirect plugin. I’m still really glad I have yours though.
Yesterday I sent an e-newsletter to prospects and mistakenly put a few “trash” characters at the end of one of the links. Sure enough, when you click on it, it goes to the right page anyway, thanks to your plugin. Wicked cool. 🙂
Andy
