If you haven’t made the jump from a traditional Website to a company blog, you’ll at least want to pay attention to one very important feature of the blogosphere: permalinks.
PRR is an excellent communications consultancy that I worked for one summer. They recently underwent a beautiful Website redesign/rebrand that has just one big problem. In the process of reformatting the site, they completely disrupted all their old links. Suddenly, the link that used to go to CEO Rita Brogan’s bio now gives searchers a 404 not found error. (Her new bio can be found here.)
This wouldn’t have been much of a problem back before the blogosphere got everyone hyper linking (pun intended) to one another all the time, but we’ve entered an era where even traditional website owners need to be aware of the permalink. From now on, anyone that finds a blog post that refers to Rita and clicks on the link to her bio will meet with a 404. This process is called link rot.
Fortunately for everyone, there’s an easy fix to this problem. Just copy the permalink to this post (it’s in the title) and send it to your Web designer. Ask him or her to make changes to the .htaccess file for your domain to point all the old links to the new ones. It’s a couple hours worth of work to make sure that all the necessary redirects are in place, but it optimizes your site both for bloggers who are linking in and for search engines that tend to keep old links around for quite a while.
And in case you want to make the change yourself, just download your .htaccess file (make sure your FTP client can “see” hidden files), open it in your favorite text editor and add the following code:
Redirect /directory/file http://yoursite.com/directory/file
There are many precautions, from preventing link rot to initiating a company blogging policy that non-blogging companies can do to co-exist more comfortably with the blogosphere. We’ll talk about more of these techniques at our upcoming conference.
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