Pages that I have redirected

When I was removing some of the content on this website I was just deleting the file from the server and then making a request via GSC to remove it from the Google index. This was problematic when it came to other search engines.

I was looking a HTML redirects but I had not taken this to a logical conclusion. It seems that this is quite easy to implement a Permenant 301 redirect.

An example of this is my page about The Thatcher. This is now redirected in .htaccess to a page about threatening the webmaster.

Like so many other things when you work them out you wonder why you didn't think of it before! This also solves the problem with the access of pages that are found by other means other than Google

The effect of Cache

Testing this it seems that some redirections, when edited, need to flushed from the browser cache. The second page on the Thatcher should go to this page. It still goes to the original redirect of the index page - check this on phone/tablet. Firefox seems to redirect properly.

Note: the "second page" above will result in a log entry for the page that is redirected - not the page that it is redirected to.

The importance of this relates to what those that are trying to access. My work for the Craft Fair 2022 is an example of this. The file/page at the time of writing this was redirected to not_available.html.

However, I think that the cache has an effect here are the page reported in the logs for the craft fair initially logged as the redirected page, not the original page. I did not clear cache but Firefox redirected to the correct page. I also currently have a duplicate line in .htaccess.

You would think that I would learn

Having removed some pages and redirected searches that could still be looking for the original page I continued to author pages that were possibly sensitive.