"Freebie" Package Users: Urgent Notice

It appears that Google--who gave the English language a wonderful new word expressing ineffably profound stupidity, Googlery--has now, after over a year of pleading by webmasters about "302 hijacking', responded in nearly the dumbest way imaginable, and is by simply penalizing all 302 redirects in place for more than a day or two, period the end, no matter if they are to within the same domain or not.

It thus becomes an urgent necessity that all users of the "Freebie" package at once modify the Freebie-related lines in their .htaccess file so that the flags code on the Rewrites is changed from--

[L]​

--to--

[L,R=301]​

That will convert the former 302 rewrite of the many per-book URLs from dynamic forms to static forms from a 302 to a 301.

This is urgently important!!​

Meanwhile, I am working on a major new release of Freebie that will include the internationalization that was formerly a separate package, and a number of other changes that I hope will be improvements.

I regret that between that task and maintaining the encyclopedia project I have been unable to respond as quickly as I would prefer to emails and PMs here, but please have a little patience.

Thank you all.

Note: The full .htacess lines in question will look something like--the details will vary from site to site--this after modification

RewriteRule ^books-plain/([A-Z0-9]+)\.html$ /freebie-dir/free2.php?&asin=$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^books-reviewed/([A-Z0-9]+)\.html$ /freebie-dir/free2.php?&asin=$1 [L,R=301]​

The "flags" are the part in [braces, like this]

 

Thanks for the update. I've had many of my "book" pages dropped recently. I wonder if this is might be why?

 

I had also been loosing pages from my book sections, but had put it down to a tightening of Google's duplicate content filter.

Maybe this will bring some of them back into the index.

Thanks, Eric.

 

Congratulations on 1000 posts RB

 

Thanks Weirfire.

 

Your welcome,

At this rate you'll be catching me up

I better start posting more on the person above you thread