Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 15 years 3 months 23 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
I’ll bet you $1000 that if we took an existing and well established default site installation today, and first upgraded it to WP 2.82, then we set WP up correctly with our chosen SEO plug-ins, correct permalinks, etc. that we would LOSE rankings in the search engines within 90 days.
Why?
Because all of the default URLs will 302 to the new pages, instead of 301 redirect, and all of the inbound link equity and indexed pages would disappear. This means rankings would drop.
Why?
Because someone at WordPress actually made the conscious decision to change the CORRECT server response, a 301, into the WRONG one, a 302 with the latest release, 2.82. This doesn’t “accidentally” happen, someone forced a change!
Why?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?
There are probably hundreds of websites that I’m sure are already being affected by this, . All it takes is for them to have changed permalinks or once they were into a 2.82 environment, and it’s “game over” after Google gets done with them, isn’t it?
There are also probably dozens or even hundreds of well-meaning development firms that are “fixing” client blogs TODAY, and in reality they may actually be doing them harm.
If you didn’t see my first post, with a short video, you might want to check it out, but the bottom line is that there’s a right way to do a redirect, that retains rankings, inbound link value, page rank etc. and there’s a wrong way, and this is wrong.
When WordPress 2.82 came out, we did more than our share of quick upgrades because it came out so quickly after 2.81.
It was after we’d done a few of them that @johnandrews first mentioned that he’d seen a problem, and after investigating a little further I posted about it, and resigned myself to wait for the fix.
Now however, it’s been two weeks, and we’re doing new installations with 2.81, and that’s just dumb.
Then I got a phone call yesterday, where someone had a WordPress site that had been around for 18 months and was older, 2.5, but was just a default installation.
Then a couple of weeks ago, they upgraded to 2.82 and he’s already seeing a loss in traffic.
I saw that his pages in the index were still the default WP url structure, even though his permalinks.
I also saw that the old urls were now 302 redirecting to the new. Not good, huh?
His WP site had been around for 18 months, he has links, traffic, PageRank and rankings. if someone doesn’t fix this, (Maybe redo the thing in 2.81?) who knows what might happen!
What I really can’t understand is why WordPress hasn’t fixed it, and why nobody in the larger community of WordPress & SEO seems to be talking about it yet.
I find it hard to believe nobody’s noticed, but maybe not?
Anyone want to take the bet?
And people wonder why I don’t upgrade to the new versions of WP until it’s been out for 4-6 weeks. I’ve skipped all of the 2.8X nonsense for now, and and I’m loving life with 2.7.1.
It seems like these upgrades have become a real mess since v2.5 was released.
Wow! At first I didn’t believe you, but I just tested it, and sure enough they are 302ing!
However, this isn’t an issue for URLs that haven’t been changed and thus aren’t redirecting. Meaning that if you modified your URL structure prior to 2.8.2 and those URL’s have been indexed you are safe. If you modify old URLs to new ones after installing 2.8.2 then the old will 302. So I would say modify your URLs and get them indexed before you upgrade.
Are you sure that WordPress hasn’t used 302 redirects for quite some time?
There are plugins available to help make structure changes easily while still using 301 redirects and those didn’t just crop up recently.
Also, as Joe mentioned, your title makes it sound like upgrading to 2.8.2 will hurt your rankings when it fact, it’s actually changing your URL structure that could hurt your rankings, when we’ve all known that for quite some time.
Even if WP used 301 redirects changing your URL structure can have a negative impact on your rankings (at least in the short term).
@Zander, you do realize there are security updates in many of the new releases right? You might be loving life with 2.7 but you won’t be once your site gets hacked.
Re; yeah 301’s still not the preference – never changing URL’s is – but still, 301’s will minimize the impact
I have to agree, Zander, and after having my programmer spend more than 6 hours one day, then two the next, trying to fix a hacked site a couple of months ago, I sure wasn’t loving life!
I just left a #blogchat yesterday on Twitter hearing how it was “safe” to go to 2.8.2.
Back to the drawing board. Thanks for the timely article.
WP 2.8.3 is just out today. Does that solve the problems?
Claims to be a security fix but might include this.
302 update http://bit.ly/d5jKU & look at the date of these support request. http://bit.ly/2CHpfm
Sorry, but that’s really old – In this really short video i demonstrated that the 301 was working –
After reading the comments in your last post it appears this feature certainly isn’t working as intended, however, as I stated, I don’t think this is a new issue.
It sure would be nice if they’d fix it though.
Oh yeah, it’s “new” definitely was a 301 before…
Thanks for the update and summary on 2.8.2 – ever since 2.8.1 I haven’t been able to autoupgrade from the WP-Admin panel – it was quite annoying – but it looks like that whatever broke with my autoupgrade capability in 2.8.1 was a saving grace to not allow me to get to 2.8.2 🙂 Cheers! Matthew (swansonager)
Scott, why are you so confident it’s new to 2.8.2?
As Joe Hall points out, there have been issues with WP and 302 redirects for quite some time.
For example, I helped someone change the names of several of their category pages last year and since he had included category titles in his URLs, all the automatic redirects WP served were 302’s not 301s.
Again, I don’t think this is an issue that’s new to 2.8.2 but would love for someone who hasn’t upgraded yet to do a test.
Ok, I’ve just performed a test using a WP 2.7.1 install (I have no idea why I still have one of those) and can verify that it too is serving up 302 errors.
There is NO reason not to upgrade to the newest version and I would recommend a plugin if you’d like to automate the process of creating 301 redirects when your permalink structure (or any URL for that matter) changes.
Sorry I never answered this – Well I can’t speak for that version, and have none to test any more, but it seems to me that I remember it being “right” earlier than that… Huh.
Anyone know what version it was where they introduced the feature called – “You don’t have to edit .htaccess anymore when you change a post category or edit a permalink”.
Be careful with your bets. If you’re not pulling in any traffic to begin with, then you won’t lose any traffic when switching to WP 2.82. 🙂
Nice man. I tried them and got the results as you have stated. Will they rectify that in the next edition?
They’re at 2.84 now, and it’s still not “right” in my opinion – old permalinks now return 200’s!
Yeah, really serving up 200’s for old links is even worse than 302’s.
The issue can still be remedied by a) not changing your link structure b) using an .htaccess file to control the redirects c) using a plugin such as redirection to create the proper redirects on a page level basis.
Absolutely, Ben, the issue certainly can be worked around, but it shouldn’t have to be – especially since it all worked correctly just a few versions ago.
The vast majoriy of people won’t / don’t even know there IS a problem, much less will they take the time to edit their .htaccess or install a plugin.
This is an insane decision by someone – WordPress 2.85 (upgraded) is now reporting 404 for either a single changed permalink, or changing permalinks site-wide.
I’ve just stumbled across this site and, as a WP user I’m stunned by the amount of SEO issues this raises.
Have we heard any news from WP about this issue? If we’ve lost traffic and rankings, is there any way of restoring them.
Matt