Let’s say you have a “normal” home page, with an introductory paragraph, heading, title, etc, telling you what the site is about. This content doesn’t change much, though you may adjust it from time to time to refine your message and make it clearer to your users.

Now, what if you then decide to build a blog for the site. You put it in a directory, /news/, linked to from your main navigation. You write away. The blog will gradually become its own section, a pile of content. You’ve only linked to it from your navigation, and it isn’t really contributing to the overall nature of the rest of the site.  Users will tend to either stay in the blog or stay in the rest of your site.

Instead of this, what if you instead used the categories of your blog, to display headlines and summaries of recent content on your various pages, even if it just the home page.  Naturally linking to sections of articles, either with certain tags or topics, or just because they are new, is surely good for users, and will make your blog more a part of your site.

Don’t let your blog become an orphan.  No one will want to read it if it doesn’t flow with the rest of your information.  Tools like WordPress are, after all, just a means of more easily publishing HTML pages.  It is certainly not a magic wand that will increase your rankings.

Upon completing the move, we soon learned that there were many more 404 errors than there should have been.  The old host did not provide .htaccess support *cough* Yahoo! *cough*, but happened to rewrite many of the URIs in a way that  was not happening in the new environment, hence the 404′s.  For example, /index.html did not exist, but there were about 60 external links pointing at this exact page, which had existed in a prior incarnation.  The old server saw that /index.html did not exist, then requested index.php instead, and redirected to /.  This was, in retrospect, the desired behavior.

Something I failed to consider is that different hosts request index documents in a different order.   The new host first looked for /index.html, before moving on to other options.  Because I didn’t immediately realize this, it ended up causing big problems.

This line in .htaccess caused an infinite loop:

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.mywebsite.com/

As it turns out, even if the /index.html document doesn’t exist, the very act of redirecting from it makes the server think that it does.  Because the server now thought /index.html existed, requesting the website root cause the browser to quickly crash.  My solution was to instead redirect straight to the /index.php file.

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php

I then, in my infinite wisdom, added this tag to the top of /index.php:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mywebsite.com/" />

The home page of the website was soon removed from the search-index.  After all, everything is redirecting to /index.php, a totally separate URI, and a page which now said it was nothing but a duplicate of a web address that no longer existed.  That is why this post is titled:

How not to use the <rel=”canonical”> tag!