redirect Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

It seems I’m not alone in finding that scrolling through my Google Reader feeds is causing me to get redirected to Google.com spreadsheets and documents.

The cause appears to be the blog of Google anti-spam expert and popular blogger Matt Cutts.

His site is currently doing the same redirect – and it appears that when that particular feed loads in Google Reader it has the same effect, because it happens when I view all unread items, for example, but not if I’m just looking at the Google Reader homepage which doesn’t feature his post!

This is obviously just an inconvenient one-off which I’m sure Matt will fix, but more worringly, it does point to a way someone could redirect any site with a decent number of subscribers to any site in this way. Hopefully it’ll be patched soon to avoid any website redirects causing this problem when it’s actually the RSS feed being supplied.

How to solve the problem:

If you subscribe to Matt’s blog, as soon as Google Reader loads, go straight to the settings page and unsubscribe from his site. That will let Google Reader work as normal. You might want to follow @mattcutts on Twitter to be alerted to re-subscribe when he’s fixed it!

Update: Matt appears to have fixed his redirect problemon the blog itself, but obviously the archived post still screws up Google Reader, and there’s no word on whether it might lead to a change in Google Reader itself…

Once more I’ve learned a lesson about doing the appropriate research before jumping into something! My move from Blogger to WordPress ran into problems when I tried the feature to ‘auto-import from blogger’ feature, due to the fact I’m with Godaddy hosting. So I had to export from blogger, import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from there and import into my hosted WordPress blog! And even then 6 months of my blog somehow disappeared, and are still being re-added when I have time.

But on top of that I forgot to put a proper redirect for people visiting my old blog, assuming that a post telling them I’d moved, and the lack of new content would see my old blog gently slip under the waves of the Google search…Wrong!

Not only did my old blog continue to rank higher than this one (Google PR4), and still attract visitors, but if they visited an individual post, there was no indication I’d moved. And I suspect all that duplicate content is why this blog still has a Page Rank of 0. Google no like duplicate content.

Tonight, I finally sorted it out, thanks to the excellent ‘How to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress instructions here. So now my old blog will finally be removed from Google, visitors are automatically redirected, there’s a direct redirect to individual posts where the importing actually worked, and there’s even a public information notice up explaining!

I get there in the end!

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Experiencing a strange Google Reader redirect to Google Docs?

Moving from Blogger to WordPress – the saga continues