I was in the middle of replying to your PM. But since you felt the need to discourage anyone from buying this service in my sales thread, I will reply here.
And, had you actually responded in the PM I'd have known you responded instead of assuming you were ignoring my request because you never sent a message. Some people don't hang out on BHW that often.
You have three different redirection plugins running on your blog (including KE).
You were three versions behind on KE, when I already suggested that you upgrade but you didn't do it. It's OK I upgraded for you.
I have two redirect plugins working. One to manage incoming 404s and one to manually set 301s. This is pretty standard. I was unaware I was behind on the plugin. Thanks for the update, even though it didn't fix the problem.
After I upgraded your software, I created a test post and made sure the redirection worked properly, It did.
I never said I had a problem with manually created posts. My problem is with the AUTO-posts created by incoming search terms...and IT STILL EXISTS. Since I don't use the "plug in a list of keywords and spit out a bunch of pages" function it is not something I'd tested...until now. Perhaps the confusion is that you call the process of manually entering keywords and creating pages for them auto-posting? What do you call it when posts are automatically created from incoming search terms?
Then I used auto-post to create the post with the same keyword and redirect that you used initially. That all worked perfectly. I checked the cloaing with three different computer/browsers. A-OK.
When did I ever say there was a problem with the cloaking? I don't care about cloaking. I wouldn't even be using it except for some reason your plugin won't use the cloaking function if the delayed 301 function is being used. I think this is dumb but since I was getting traffic to those auto-created (by search engines rather than manually by me) pages so I had to turn off cloaking and do manual 301s.
And AGAIN, this has NOTHING to do with posts that you create manually by feeding in a keyword and setting the URL you want it to point to. This has to do with the post that are AUTOMATICALLY created from incoming search terms. With those, you CANNOT change the redirect URL even after deleting the post.
Just to verify, I did a test following your methodology. First, I deleted a post that was pointing to my home page vs the correct internal page and recreated it using the manual creation method. I pointed it to the home page as it was originally. Then I deleted it. Out of curiosity, I went back to the page I had deleted and *wow* the 301 redirect was still working!! Shouldn't I have gotten a 404 error since that page should now no longer exist? Not getting a 404 error but instead continuing to encounter the 301 your plugin created pretty much proves that it's made some sort of permanent change to my database which isn't being removed when the post is being removed. But, I continued on...with the same result - the post was redirecting to the wrong page.
So, I decided to test further. I deleted everything that I'd done in the previous test and created (using the manual method) a post for the initial target keyword. This time I pointed it to the correct URL. Unfortunately, when I tested it, it STILL went to the home page as it was initially automatically created, not to the correct URL I added when manually creating the post. So yeah, even using the manual method you still can't change the 301 of a page that has been created.
We have over 1000 sites using this plugin, and we only get a couple tech support requests per day for this product, so please don't assume that everyone has the same issues you have.
I'm not assuming that. I'm assuming that most people haven't tried changing the 301 location of their posts. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has or has not done this successfully in which case I will assume that my standard wordpress install is somehow different than the 1000 others this is running on.
I just did a spot-check on about 20 of your Link List pages. Out of 20, none of them linked to a category page. They all went to the intended Permalink destination OR were redirected to home page. So I believe that saying 1500 of your pages are pointing to the wrong place is simply an exaggeration.
What does this have to do with the category page? It just so happens that the first example I gave you pointed to a category page. Your solution was that it was a problem with the category page being indexed so to prove this is not the case, I provided an example of one that is pointing to my home page when it should not be. YOU may be ok with all of your traffic funneling to your home page and your visitors then having to find the specific information they're looking for themselves rather than taking them directly to what they want, but I'm not. I actually want my visitors to be taken directly to the information they're looking for. All those pages pointing to the home page shouldn't be. Most of them should be pointing to internal pages but YOUR PLUGIN WON'T LET ME CHANGE WHERE THEY'RE POINTING and that is a PROBLEM!
Mandom, I don't want to lose a customer, especially after I took the time to personally record a screencast for you to demonstrate some features/functionality; But you are clearly unhappy with this product and I would gladly issue you a refund if that is your wish, and I don't want anyone's money if they are unhappy with my product.
I would like to keep using the product, IF I can change the 301. If we can't figure out how to fix this then I'm going to have to stop using the product and, in addition, I will have to hire someone to manually go into my database and fix all the incorrect redirects your plugin has created. Yay! That should be both fun and expensive!
You can manually fix the issue you are having by just deleting the post (and delete from trash), and using auto-post to manually create the page to the URL destination of your choice. I just did this. It works.
I just did it too and it doesn't work. It continues to redirect to the intial URL even when I manually create a post pointing to the correct URL. I'd be happy to do some kind of screen viewer session with you so I can demonstrate what I'm seeing since we're either miscommunicating or we're seeing something different for some reason.
And as for the 'huge problem this plugin has created on your site'. Keyword Explosion uses your organic traffic to build targeted posts the the pages that are ALREADY getting traffic. Your category pages were getting a bit of traffic, and Keyword Explosion captured the incoming keywords to these pages and it increased traffic to those pages. This is exactly by design. We have no way to know whether a webmaster wants traffic to category pages or any other page. It simply creates content-rich pages to increase traffic.
Again, this has nothing to do with category pages. This has to do with the fact that once your plugin has created a URL for a keyword the 301 initially created can't be changed. I don't care if the initial 301 link is pointing to my category page, my home page or the pie in the sky, if I can't delete it and change it, that's a problem.
So, again, I'd reiterate my earlier post and would recommend that people not use this until this issue is dealt with. I'd love to hear from other users who have perhaps tested this (changing the automatic 301) to see if they're experiencing the same problem or if it's really only me.
BTW, I decided to test this on the other sites where I have the plugin installed and they're all the same. Once a 301 is created by your plugin, it can't be changed or deleted.
