by Mike Evans, 20 August 2012
Over the weekend we realised that many visitors to specific historic posts, via Google and other search engines, were being directed to the Macfilos home page instead of to the individual articles.
Further research shows that almost all URLs from the Squarespace 5 days and earlier were failing. Current posts omit the /home page suffix, which was our default for Squarespace 5. All earlier posts, which are indexed on Google including /home, are now failing. When the site was migrated we were not warned about this, in fact we were not warned about much, and the whole situation is regrettable.
We are discussing this with Squarespace. One option is to revert back to including /home in the URL, which I hope would re-enable searches to the 2000-odd earlier posts, or to stick with the new, shorter URL and try in some way to redirect visitors so they see the actual posts rather than the home page.
When we have a decision, with luck before the end of today, we will take action.
It looks like we are not alone in having problems following migration to Squarespace 6. Stephen Hackett of 512Pixels has had to take the drastic step of returning his blog to WordPress because of similar broken links. I hope Macfilos will be easier to fix.
In the meantime, apologies if you are searching for an original post and end up seeing this article at the top of the Home page instead of what they are looking for. Please bear with us and try searching using the Search function on the left.
Again something that I’ve run into too, and having trouble solving as a new Squarespace user. I’d love to hear if you manage to get this sorted out!
Best,
Kate
Kate,
This was a big problem for about three weeks. I hadn’t realised (and had certainly not been warned) that all old links would be broken when I moved up from SS 5 to version 6. The problem was that all my old posts had been indexed using macfilos/home/ where the new system in SS 6 drops the /home/. I had a long correspondence with SS about this and was told that nothing could be done. However, some weeks later everything miraculously righted itself. My new posts are referenced without the /home/ but any search for an old post which had previously included /home/ seem to be resolved correctly. If you want to discuss this please send me a private message with specific problem and I will try to help (not that I am in any way an expert).
Michael