“Like at Halloween: I knew I’d arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character.” ~Jane Badler

Saturday my family and I went to a Halloween party/dinner. However, at 1pm we were still having troubles trying to decide what to go as. A few web searches showed that there are some ambitious and creative people out there when it comes to Halloween costumes.

An important element in ranking in Google is having other websites linking to your website. Simple enough, right? So simple that Google has written algorithms that try to penalize people for gaming their system.

If you gain too many “backlinks,” too soon; have lots of spammy backlinks; or both; you can trigger the penalty algorithms. These algos will assassinate your website and leave it in the land of the domain dead. You will no longer exist to the hundreds of millions of Google searchers.

The problem with these deadly algos, is that your competitors can “build” massive spammy links to your website, and potentially get you banned. Google denies this as possible, but I believe this to be a pernicious lie. I’ve seen first hand (but not by my hand) sites receiving the death ray of backlinks from their competitors and shortly after being penalized.

Lately, I have been getting a lot of requests on how to 301 pages in WordPress. It is actually a really simple process, but a step that makes it even easier is using a plugin titled, WP htaccess Control.

This plugin makes optimizing your .htaccess file very easy, and therefore, I have added it to my “meat and potato” plugins I use to setup every blog with. I will have to write another post on what all the features are, but in short this plugin gives you access to your .htaccess file via your WordPress admin dashboard.

To setup a 301 with the WP htaccess Control plugin, you need to go to the plugin admin (titled WP htaControl). Here go to the third menu (custom htaccess) and enter the following code (be sure to change the structure and domain for your circumstances: