So as many of my readers know, about a week ago I switched Consumerism Commentary from the Movable Type platform to WordPress. There were a number of reasons for the change, including MT’s long rebuild times for example.

Since this migration caused a slight change in the URIs for my entries — namely, the underscore characters became dashes — I had to write a small script to handle the translation so no links from outside would be broken. Even though I was changing software, old link to my blog still needed to work and not produce an error.

Doing the translation wasn’t as easy as doing a “permanent redirect” in .htaccess — I had to write a PHP script that is called from .htaccess whenever underscores are encountered in the URL. The script replaces them with dashes and redirects the browser back to the server, where .htaccess is interpreted again.

Basically, the links weren’t broken, but I lost my Google Pagerank on almost all of my pages.

I saw the effects immediately. My daily AdSense revenue tanked to sometimes less than 50% of what was expected. This has been the case almost all week, but the last few days, it appears as if things are returning to normal. I’ll have to wait another few weeks to determine if there is any more fallout from the change.

The improvements seemed to coincide with when I installed the WordPress plugin that enables a Google Sitemap, so perhaps that was the key.

Today’s earnings are pretty high for a Friday so far.

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About the Author

Flexo, the owner and creator of Consumerism Commentary, has been blogging and writing for the internet since 1995 and has been building online communities since 1991. Find out more about him and follow him on Twitter.

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