To update my earlier notes about the Independent Newspaper’s web redesign having broken all the hyperlinks to it on my site - including the ones from yesterday morning that sent them 50 visitors.

Having checked, I have sent the Independent something like 400-500 visitors in the last 2 weeks or so - just on links that I am monitoring. And we are only a C+ list blog on a good day.

Heaven knows how much traffic they get from the likes of Political Betting, and the other sites with 8-10 times our unique visitors. Mike Smithson’s post there yesterday based around a link to the Indy had 364 comments on it, and he gets around 50,000 page views a day - compared to our 4,000-7,000.

This is seriously not clever. Not preserving permalinks (i.e., web addresses of articles) like this is the most effective way to - how do I put this strongly enough to get the point over - fuck your own website, short of deleting it altogether.

Among other things,

• It costs traffic.
• It costs Technorati rank (even though some people don’t care about it - I am not amongst them).
• And it costs Google backlinks (so searches go to blank places until Google deletes the link.

Broken permalinks happen to nearly every blogger who moves from the Blogspot service to their own domain, and for bloggers it normally takes between 3 and 6 months of promotion to get back to where they were before in profile. Most political bloggers know next-to-nothing about the technical side of the internet - so they at least have an excuse; national newspapers do not.

Come on Indy. Get your arse in gear and sort this out by Monday. The Times gets it right.

I would make a comment on the new Not the Spectator Coffee House Blog, but the whole site is down.

There won’t be any more links in my roundups until I know what you are doing.

Chicken Yoghurt has also covered this.

Tags: independent, newspaper publishing company, open house blog, permalink[tags]independent, newspaper publishing company, open house blog, permalink[/tags]