Wordpress Permalink Redirect: Category Feed Culprit
Recently I was getting all kinds of errors when trying to access the feed to one of my categories on one of my other blogs, republishing the “Oak Ridge” category feed from my main yoga blog, Yoga with Santosh, to a “group” blog, Oak Ridge Yoga.
(So far I’m the only member of the group. But I can still dream of others writing my content for me, can’t I?)
By trial and error, I identified the Permalink Redirect plugin as the culprit. It had been holding my category feeds hostage for over a year, and I didn’t even know. I disabled it. Category feeds work just fine now.
So I deleted Permalink Redirect. Forever.
Of course, as soon as I figured it out who the culprit was in my plugins folder, I found that several other people had come to the same conclusion and written about it on their sites. Sometimes a little bit of search mojo goes a long way, and my mojo hadn’t worked, apparently. So if you find this post, you’re welcome in advance for the minutes or hours you would have wasted without my kind help.
The nice thing about the Permalink Redirect plugin was that it added trailing slashes to urls.
Who cares about trailing slashes?
You should. Because Wordpress adds them to the ends of your urls, treating every post and page as its own subdirectory.
Not everyone who links to your pages, though, will add the trailing slashes. That goes for the search engines, too.
And what that means is, the same page will be counted as both a page and a folder. Your analytics will be funky, and search engines may be confused, perhaps even splitting page PR.
You need to fix it to make your site more search engine friendly. This can be a small but important step in your on-page search engine optimization (SEO).
There’s an easy remedy in your Apache .htaccess file. And I used my search mojo to see that someone has already described the cure so I won’t have to: Two Wordpress plugins you don’t need… and shouldn’t use.
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