The Handy HTTP 301, Google Related

Original date: June 12, 2006 9:27 PM by sonnik

Referencing this post, you'll see I recently had some trouble with my old web host and installation of Movable Type. This has seemingly caused a problem with the way Google's search robots are accessing my website. No worries, the HTTP 301 Redirect should fix the problem.

I'm also using Google Sitemaps. Using this utility, I can see that Google's robots (aka Googlebot) last successfully archived my site on May 20. When I installed Movable Type at my new host, the naming convention and URL paths were changed. Despite my updated sitemap file (which should aid Google's cataloging of my website), Googlebot still seems to be looking in the old locations (as recently as June 7, according to the Sitemaps website). Google Sitemaps indicates 404 errors on pages not found (it's using the old naming conventions/locations, no longer in my XML Sitemaps file).


Luckily, my new web host lets me include a local .htaccess file. In this file, I have a line such as:


redirect 301 /archives/000059.html http://www.sonnik.com/2006/05/extracting_audio_only_from_tiv.html


For search engines and bookmarks, this tells the browser or bot that the web page has a new permanent location. Here's a good article on the subject.


While discussing Google, I thought I'd mention that I changed my Individual Entry template on Movable Type to include the new Google Related from Google Labs. You'll see the content at the bottom of this page.