Error 404 : Webmaster Brain Cell Not Found
• Webmaster Mistakes
One of my purposes here - if there’s any overall plan beyond solipsistic typing - is to confess my mistakes so that maybe others who make similar will know that they aren’t the only dopey webmaster.
My most recent one (admittedly that I’m aware of) was a beaut.
Now I wondered why traffic to a site suddenly spiked. Seemed to be lots of traffic from Google all of a sudden. I didn’t wonder deeply: Google is as capricious a mistress as Wanda in Venus in Furs.
Nor did I notice that my 404s had similarly spiked.
Looking at the .htaccess on another site I saw that I’d really screwed up a redirect last week when I moved an old section of one site on to a domain of its own.
I’d pointed to the wrong domain. While they are similar in theme they don’t have the same pages, hence the 404s.
All I did was lose useful traffic and annoy a number of web surfers (who should be spared that at least until they get to the page they wanted to see).
This is among the more boneheaded mistakes I’ve made as a webmaster.