An Update on Backlinks

Yeah, we know, if you’re reading this, you probably don’t care about old backlinks. But, it is what fuels our dominant search engine position… so it’s certainly important to this site.

As you may know, we’re switching to WordPress within the next month, and it uses an entirely new URL structure. That’s a good thing… it’s one of the reasons why we’re making the switch. Joomla’s URLs are ugly, not just to you, but to search engines. It’s one of the reasons why our high search engine ranking is something we’re proud of… we’ve done it in spite of being penalized for using Joomla (not penalized intentionally, but Joomla has fallen behind the crowd in terms of SEO).

We have decided that the best way to implement legacy backlinks, is a bit of middle ground. With an article count in the four figures… hand-writing legacy backlinks is too time intensive. We’ve been testing automatic converters (on this very blog no less), but we found they weren’t nearly as viable as we had hoped. So, we’re going to hand-code legacy backlinks for our most popular articles. The criteria for that is simple… we check our records for the top 10 articles of each month, those get backlinks coded by hand. The rest… don’t.

So, what about the rest. Well, they will 404. But, we’re going to deploy 404 shaping technology that will still help you quickly get to the right article. If someone searches up an article that we didn’t backlink over, you’ll be taken to a 404 page that uses the search query to find the article on the site that best matches your query. Most of the time, this will work fine, and with one extra click… you’ll be taken to the intended article.

See, was that so bad? Okay, well, it will take a bit of work on our end, but PhoneNews.com will be a fraction of the burden to manage in 2008 as it has in previous years… (fingers crossed).