One of my pages is redirected without me redirecting it.

I too have had a strange occurrence in the last day. I have 15 pages in a custom post type and 9 of those pages had 301 redirects applied to them but those redirects did not exist inside of the plugin. In fact there were no redirects in the plugin. My client ask me to load the plugin but never actually entered anything.

Being a pessimist I did not believe this could just happen and thought they entered in information, did not realize how to use the plugin and then deleted their entries but by then the 301 had already taken place. But I know this did not happen because when I make an entry my id was still 1, 2, 3… It would have been much higher.

I used a 301 tracking tool and my redirects are actually cascading. They all appear to be going to one page but that is just a result of the cascade that happens.

http://www.wheregoes.com/retracer.php

The only thing that changed for me was updating the core from 4.3 to 4.4.

I have also search though out the site and checked the htaccess file. I can’t find the origination of the 301.

I’d love to hear some feedback. I thought it was unique to my site until this post.

Kokoruz do the redirects happen when the plugin is disabled?

Turning a redirect ‘Off’ will remove it from the list of redirects that will be captured. It’s a way to keep them in the list, but disable them for future use.

@eggplant

Yes, with the plugin disabled the redirecting still continues. It would seem as though the 301 redirect had been implemented and whether it’s listed or not once the web spiders index the redirect how do yo get around that?

Strange enough though, this is on a dev server and I have discourage search engine indexing turned on and has always been turned on.

This oddness has happen affected my live site and my dev site. The only correlation I can find was I updated both to 4.4.

On my live site I had to change the name of the slug in the permalink to prevent the redirect from happening.

This sounds like it may be a bug related to WordPress 4.4, and nothing to do with Eggplant 301 Redirects.

Here’s the current trac bug report:

wp_old_slug_redirect() in 4.4 redirecting existing posts
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35031

After updating to WordPress 4.4, I noticed that some of my existing pages were redirecting to other pages. The unique thing about these pages is that at one time they had been moved to a new slug and a new page was created and given the old slug.

I have not been able to recreate this condition by adding a new page, changing the slug, then adding a new page at the original slug. Those older pages had a _wp_old_slug custom field set with the original URL but that is not being created as I move pages now. So this may only be an issue for sites with older page moves.

I believe this behavior is caused by the removal of is_404() in [34659]. It had previously stopped a redirect away from a post / page that currently exists, even if another post had its URL in a _wp_old_slug custom field.
This is different from, but may be related to #35012.

This bug is currently marked to be fixed and released with the next minor WordPress version, which is 4.4.1.

One useful function of WordPress is to track changes to a post slug. If you’ve changed your post slug, WordPress will store the old slug in the “wp_postmeta” table under meta_key “_wp_old_slug”

For instance, let’s say you have a post:
http://example.com/german-cars/

and you later decide to rename the url to:
http://example.com/german-vehicles/

WordPress will silently store the old german-cars slug in the database, and if anyone were to hit that old URL, it’ll do an automatic 301 redirect to german-vehicles. This takes place completely separate from this (great) plugin, or any redirect plugin. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to manually setup a 301 redirect as WordPress will take care of it for you. This plugin is necessary for situations where WordPress doesn’t automatically handle it.

If you want to display (or remove) the “_wp_old_slug” records in your database, you can find some SQL commands here:
http://www.farinspace.com/removing-wordpress-old-post-slug/

By the way, here are more related bug reports, which are all marked as duplicates of the bug report above:

After upgrade to 4.4 some existing pages are redirected to other existing pages
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35114

Redirection based on _wp_old_slug postmeta value should first check if there is an active published post with the same slug!
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35189

301 infinite redirect loop error on SOME posts
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/35184