Something embarrassing happened to me on the way to social bookmarking. Bookmarks are an SEO (search engine optimization) tool that is often overlooked by newbies. Fortunately, I was aware of this tool and quickly went to a few sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com to bookmark my last post.
I manually bookmarked my article. I was very proud of myself. A week later I reloaded another of my blog posts which I thought was particularly interesting. I decided to check the original marker.
404 Page not found problem:
I clicked on my link. I got the dreaded “Page not found” error message. Has this happened to you? Have you ever found yourself in this situation? The social bookmarking link came to my site and showed the 404 page not found error message, but not the article I wanted to refer to. Sometimes you feel helpless.
What the hell was going on? What was the cause? Perhaps your first thought is that you somehow deleted the post on your blog. INCORRECT! He’s still there.
Perhaps the cause of the error message is the fact that a blog, in this case a WordPress blog, automatically places the oldest posts on the home page. That somehow this is the reason why the search engine can’t find your post. INCORRECT!
Your brain quickly searches for a solution. Four possible solutions may come to mind:
- You must create a page on your blog for that post. That way, any reference to that page would be permanent, but that’s not a practical solution.
- Assign a unique category to the post. That is not very practical either.
- Direct your link from the social bookmarking site to the article directory source and not to your blog, but some social media sites do not allow a direct link to an article directory.
- Finally, consider editing the reference to your article in the social bookmark; it will not allow you to edit the reference.
Again wrong!
Social bookmarking solution:
Have you ever heard of permanent links? The permalinks are found in WordPress in the control panel under Settings. A permalink is the name or URL tag that is used to identify a particular web address, such as a web page, website, or blog post. Most content management systems (CMS), like blogs, use permalinks to keep track of posts.
In my case, being a newbie and still learning, I had changed the composition of my permalinks so that when the social bookmarking site searched the web, it could not find my post and I would get the dreaded 404 page not found message. I wasn’t aware of the impact my WordPress setup experience was having on my blog.
The simple solution is to redefine your permalink to your “postname”. You can define a permalink to identify your post name, category, author, date, and other unique tags. If you are social bookmarking, use a permalink that defines the name of the post and its author. So many things to learn!
The more you learn, the more money you will make!