With the recent security problem encountered here and subsequent SEO (search engine optimization) damage, I’ve taken the opportunity to perform a major tune-up and upgrade to Hooked On Golf Blog.
WP 2.05
I’ve been running Hooked On Golf Blog with WordPress 1.52 for over a year and a half. I’ve been very happy with the performance and features of WP1.52. I’ve seen many upgrades come and go but since I’ve done SO much custom work to the code, features and presentation I’ve avoided the hassle of upgrading. Fear of whacking the whole site out and having to go through a PITA to fix everything has kept me from doing the upgrade. The upgrade to the latest version of WP was actually really easy and now I’m wishing I would have done it sooner!
So now the engine that drives this golf blog is up to date and hopefully more effecient.
SEO
Since the hack has damaged many of my search engine rankings, I’ve made some changes in the format of the URL’s here. The new URL’s will be a little better for search engines to crawl. The URL’s will now actually contain the name of the post in them. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while as well but didn’t want to mess with something that was working at the time.
Old URL category example:
https://www.hookedongolfblog.com/?cat=9
New URL category example:
https://www.hookedongolfblog.com/category/reviews/
Old URL post example:
https://www.hookedongolfblog.com/?p=1080
New URL post example:
https://www.hookedongolfblog.com/2006/10/13/top-secret-nike-sumo-pictures-revealed/
The new URL has the year/month/day/name in the format rather than an arbitrary “?p=x” name.
Old links are still OK
Obviously there are thousands of links referring to this golf blog with the old format. I’ve enabled a feature that will tell the search bots that there’s a new URL for that old link when they crawl the site, and the old links will still work if you click them from another golf blog to here. So no posts will be lost and no 404 (page not found) errors will happen…. I hope.
Back to golf please
I hope all this stuff is done now so I can get back to golf blogging about Tiger Woods, Michelle Wie, the PGA Tour, Natalie Gulbis in bikinis, Titleist, Nike, my on the course antics and more.
HOGWire – Golf Industry News
