Nothing sucks worse that a 404 error message. What’s a 404 error? Well, its when you click a dead link on a site and you get “sorry, this page doesn’t exist.” This can happen when a company changes or updates their website, when they yank down a promotion, or generally make changes to the navigation structure of a web site.

But, how cruddy is it when you change your blog URL, causing all the old article links to become dead? For a company, this is really bad form, and for a blogger too, especially if you want to have some kind of credibility. I mean really, how difficult is it to put up proper re-directs?

Bottom line: If you want people to find your amazing prose or deft analysis of something and hope to gain from the “long tail” of search, you will need to do one of two things:

1. keep the old site up and linked to the new one indefinitely: Jeremiah Owyang managed to do this very well, and even links to the archives from the old blog on his current blog
2. point re-directs from every post on the old blog to the URL of that post on the new blog: there are automated ways to do this when transferring over from one URL to another, but if you are prolific, Option 1 might be a better approach
3. (marginal at best) link back to the main page of your blog. NEVER link back to the main page of your web site, because the original link was for a blog post — that’s a sure way of getting people to leave – they want to read an article, not your sales pitch

Either way, if you are a company, chances are you’re blogging to improve your SEO, be seen as a thought leader and, generally speaking, gain more business. It makes you look bad if blog links go back to your main web site instead.

If you’re a blogger, you really want people to find your content, so don’t make it hard, otherwise you loose the long tail advantage of keeping your content up there, at least for a period of time.