Oops, I have changed my 404 template today [Ed: It has changed again since this post].
I was a member of Blogflux.
Blogflux is a combination of several things: A Blog directory that has organized and cataloged about 82,000 blogs by country and by topic (or tag if you whish). They have some Blog tools, among which mapstats that they have knitted together with Google Maps, a nice feature that I like. It enables you to see from where people land on your Blog. As a free member you can have a little bit of statistical analysis. In the pro version you can have some more statistical analysis.
You see from where the people look at your Blog by the position of the red blobs on the map and you see where they land on your Blog by clicking those little red blobs.
In my case you see for instance many clicks on the posts archived as number 211. When you wanted to know what post number 211 was about, you could click on the blob and were redirected to the actual post.
That was when I had my permalinks organized by date of the post and archive number of the post.
Unfortunately I could not relate each time archive numbers to individual posts unless I clicked them again.
Therefore I have changed my archiving method into date of the post and name of the post. Post 211 ) is now
http://happyhotelier.nl/2006/11/13/qbic-dutch-answer-to-easy-hotel-yotel-and-hotel-everland/. As Qbic is hot nowadays because of their recent opening and Yotel also because of their first pod hotel at Heathrow.
I found an alternative way of getting at the same post by post number which is very easy: http://happyhotelier.nl/?p=211
My older posts will remain organized in the old way, at least for a certain period, in certain search engines. People clicking trough from those search engine results are now landing on my 404 page. How stupid am I!
However I have decided to stick to this choice and apologize to all those landing on my 404 page.
I hope that the search engines gradually will find their way around this Blog when they re index this Blog and the error will fade out in the future.
We will see.
Update
As of november 2009 I have a plugin in place that enables you to redirect outside referrals to urls of your blog that are wrong because you have changed the way you archive posts. With the Google Webmaster help you can from time to time reapair errors. I have now redirected 211 to the actual post.
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 17, 2010 at 10:30 am