Re: test.openeuphoria.org is open to the world
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jan 16, 2013
- 1413 views
My understanding was that Google expired links after a time, so once we add the password and wait patiently long enough, those links will go away. In the mean time, anyone who tried to use the incorrect versions of the links will get the Auth dialog - which can be fine tuned to explain how to get to the real version.
In theory, yes- they should die off eventually. In practice, once a link is published, it near-instantly becomes permanent- I'm still seeing traffic to some of my own links that were removed 14 years ago!
I did a major restructuring of another site about a month ago, and hits to the old links still make up a bit more than half of incoming traffic.
Which dead links are you still getting hits for?
No, it isn't critical to do this, but it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to do the redirect either; and it saves anywhere from "a few" to "a ton" of people headaches.
I think the plan will be this: We add the password prompt, with the password in the prompt. This should get the search engines to drop the links, but if one of the links happens to stay around and alive beyond this, then the human being will just answer the prompt and get access to the post. If the post is gone, then the prompt will at least tell the intelligent user how to get to the real post on the real web site.
The contents of the test and the real website are already different enough that a simple redirect will not work - some posts that are shown in search engines from the test website will stop working if we blindly redirect them to the analoguous url on the real web site.
