How to send 1000 people to a 404 error page

By Andy Beard | Published: February 7, 2007

I have had about 1000 visitors searching for information on Day Job Killer hit a 404 error page and I am not sure quite why it happened – don’t make changes when you are tired.

When I moved the review onto the front page, I didn’t think about the change in the date on the permalink, so all the visitors coming in were going to

http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html

and not

http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html

It was easy to correct with a simple change in my .htaccess

redirect 301 /2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html

It is impossible to say what sales I lost because there wasn’t a review in place until a few minutes ago, but it was still a costly mistake as far as subscribers, and looked very unprofessional.

It should be noted that most page views didn’t go looking for a correct page, they just hit the back button.

Please learn from my stupid mistake – I know I have…

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5 Comments

  1. Dawud Miracle (9 comments.)
    Posted February 7, 2007 at 3:08 pm | Permalink

    I did something similar when I pulled down a post after a couple of hours because I thought it really sucked. I wrote it when I was tired. I got Google hits for a couple of weeks after that. Though my traffic was less.

  2. Lorelle (3 comments.)
    Posted February 7, 2007 at 5:34 pm | Permalink

    You aren’t alone. I’ve done this…let’s just say “before” and not how many times. ;-) Good for you for catching it so soon.

    One thing I HATE is when I make a mizzed spelling in the title and post slug. I can fix it easily in the title, but the post slug, well, after it’s been linked to by a few hundred folks, it’s hard to change that, but redirect definitely helps. Wish I could do that on WordPress.com blogs.

  3. Andy Beard (1685 comments.)
    Posted February 8, 2007 at 12:02 am | Permalink

    Well I just got hit by it again.

    It seems Wordpress has a nasty habit of overwriting its own .htaccess file even if you don’t make changes to any plugins

  4. Manu Khanna (1 comments.)
    Posted May 12, 2007 at 10:57 am | Permalink

    H Andy, a couple of months ago I moved my blog from “manukhanna.com/blog” to “manukhanna.com”. I want to redirect all pages in the /blog folder to the blog home page (manukhanna.com). Currently I have the following in my htaccess:

    [code]RedirectPermanent ^/blog/$1 http://manukhanna.com/index.php/code

    This isn't solving the purpose. Would be great if you could help me out.

    thanks.

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