6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

Released Wednesday, 1st May 2024
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6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

6 Cautions When Using Redirects in Podcasting (plus best practices)

Wednesday, 1st May 2024
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Episode Transcript

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0:00

Six cautions plus some tips about using redirects in podcasting.

0:11

Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast.

0:14

I'm Daniel J. Lewis. Redirects come in multiple types.

0:18

When misused, they can cause some major problems.

0:21

As even happened to me recently.

0:24

So here are some warnings to watch for whenever you use redirects.

0:28

Now if you're thinking, "What in the world is a redirect?" or you want to learn more

0:31

about the different types of redirects, when to use them, when not to use them, and such,

0:34

then check out my past episode and article, "Redirects and How to Use Them in Podcasting."

0:40

I've got the link to that in the notes for this episode, and if you want those notes

0:43

or to follow along for this episode, they're a simple tap or swipe away inside your podcast

0:48

app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/redirectcautions.

0:54

As a quick disclosure, some of the products I mention I do have affiliate relationships

0:59

with, so if you purchase through my links and they're qualifying purchases, I do earn

1:03

a commission from those. But nonetheless, not all of them are like that, and regardless, I recommend things I

1:08

truly believe in, regardless of earnings.

1:11

So with that out of the way, let's jump in.

1:13

Caution number one. 301 redirects are "permanent" (we could put quotation marks around that) and "cached".

1:22

In podcasting, we throw around the term 301 redirect or permanent redirect, often without

1:28

realizing what that actually means. It's almost like it's a buzzword. But a 301 redirect

1:34

and a permanent redirect, it's the same thing. It is, or at least it's assumed to be, permanent.

1:40

That's the big keyword here.

1:43

I often use the physical mail or US post office metaphor when explaining redirects. Think

1:48

Think of a permanent redirect as a change of address notice sent back to everyone who

1:54

mails you something.

1:56

Non-permanent or temporary redirects would be more like just simply forwarding your mail

2:00

for a short time, but a permanent redirect is saying "this has changed".

2:06

It is essentially telling all the podcast apps out there "this thing has moved to

2:10

over there. Please stop looking here and always look there instead.

2:14

So don't look at me again".

2:16

That's what a 301 permanent redirect is supposed to do.

2:20

This is great when you actually made a permanent move, or at least intend for it to be permanent.

2:26

Like when you permanently move homes and change your address.

2:29

That's when you want that change of address notice to go out to everyone who sends you

2:34

stuff at your old address so they stop sending it to the old address and start sending it

2:38

to the new address. The same thing with 301 permanent redirects.

2:42

use it when you assume your move is permanent and you want all of the apps and services

2:48

to stop looking at an old URL and start looking at the new URL. But if you ever change your

2:55

mind or even worse, make a mistake in the redirect, that redirect will be followed and

3:02

the old URL will stop being checked. So for example, if you make a /feedback page that

3:08

301 permanently redirects somewhere else, then even if you change where /feedback goes,

3:15

any app that previously loaded /feedback will bypass it altogether and go straight to the

3:22

destination it has saved in its cache. Now that is if it did cache that redirect. And

3:28

the idea is that 301 redirects are supposed to be cached. But that cache is sometimes

3:34

weird, but you should assume it never will be. However, this doesn't apply for anyone

3:39

visiting your redirect for the first time because nothing's been cached yet. This is

3:44

why whenever you have weird redirect issues in a browser, I highly recommend try a different

3:49

browser or try an incognito or private browser that has no cookies, no cache, anything like

3:55

that inside it to see if the redirect works differently there. If it does, then you're

3:59

running into that caching issue. So if you get your 301 permanent redirect wrong and

4:05

you don't fix it immediately, like within a few minutes, the best thing to do is to

4:11

also redirect the incorrect destination to the correct one. And unfortunately, that's

4:19

not always possible. Thus, I recommend, if possible, you make your redirect a 307 or

4:25

302 temporary redirect, test it over a few days, not just a few minutes, and then when

4:31

you know everything is working however it's designed to work, whether it's your podcast

4:35

feed, a link that you're referring to, or anything like that, then change it to a 301

4:40

permanent redirect, if it needs to be a permanent redirect, that is.

4:45

And it might not need to be a 301, maybe it shouldn't be.

4:49

Most of this time it probably shouldn't be a 301 redirect, unless it's your RSS feed.

4:54

Caution number two, your redirect destinations might change or just disappear.

5:01

Little story time here. Contrary to the Stanley Cup craze of spring 2024, my favorite water thermos has been a

5:08

stainless steel Contigo Ashland vacuum insulated auto spout water bottle.

5:15

That is this. Ooh, you hear that?

5:18

That nice click? That spring sound?

5:21

That is the sound of hydration. Mmm.

5:27

Wonderful water coming from a great spout with a straw and it has this nice sealing

5:32

lid and it has...

5:36

You probably can't tell that that sounds different, but it is a nice carabiner clip for the water bottle.

5:41

I love this water bottle. I've had it since 2019.

5:44

Well, actually not this specific one, but this kind of water bottle because the one

5:50

I've had since 2019, and it even went with me and got temporarily confiscated when I

5:56

got to see the President speak. I did get the bottle back, but then I lost it. And I

6:04

think it was at a mall while my son and I were waiting for my broken-down car to be

6:08

towed. I thought I could simply reorder that water bottle because I love it so much, and

6:13

I thought maybe I'd get it for close to the original $10 price I paid, adjusting for

6:19

the massive inflation we've had. But no, that specific water bottle has a new version

6:24

that I don't like as much. It doesn't have that really nice carabiner belt clip

6:28

built into it and it just didn't seem like it would be as nice. And the original water

6:34

bottle, which I eventually did find, was $45 when I wanted to order it instead of the $10

6:42

I originally paid a few years ago.

6:44

So here's what makes this relevant to redirects.

6:47

The first place I went to reorder that water bottle was from my Amazon order history, where

6:52

I could click on the product link and then view that product page again and potentially

6:57

reorder it. But when I did that, my heart was initially crushed because that original link currently

7:05

says "Currently Unavailable".

7:09

No. No.

7:11

Now imagine if I had redirected to that product page with a 301 permanent redirect.

7:18

Anyone clicking through my link might have their hopes dashed just like I did.

7:22

This is why I highly recommend that any redirect to ANY URL you don't control should be a

7:29

307 temporary redirect.

7:32

A 302 redirect is also temporary and works fine, but use a 307 if you have the choice

7:37

between a 302 and a 307. Otherwise just one of them is fine for you. It's not,

7:43

it's a technical difference that really isn't that big of a deal. Just go for

7:47

307 if you can. If I had been smartly promoting that water bottle with

7:51

something like a /waterbottle redirect, I could easily change its

7:55

destination when the product URL changes or point back to a page on my own site

8:00

with a note about the product, like if it was discontinued and completely

8:05

unavailable. Now in case you're wondering, I never did find my water bottle and I did not pay $45

8:11

from Amazon. I got on Facebook Marketplace and found one in fair condition. It's a little banged

8:16

up and scratched but it was only $12 shipped and I jumped on that. I have it again and I am happy.

8:24

I am not losing this thing again. I'm really tempted to get an AirTag specifically for my

8:29

water bottle so I never lose this one again because I really like it. So bringing it back

8:33

Back again though to redirects. This whole thing of pointing back to a page or changing

8:40

where that redirect go, that's easy to do with temporary redirects because they never

8:46

get cached. So even if you used my redirect yesterday, then I changed it last night, and

8:53

you use the same redirect URL today, you would be taken to the correct destination because

9:00

your browser would not have cached where that redirect went.

9:04

I love that PrettyLinks Pro has recently added a new feature to monitor all the redirects

9:09

you create and alert you when any of them point to a broken URL.

9:14

So you could then go through and change where they link to, or put them so that they point

9:20

to a page on your site where maybe you recommend an alternative instead of that thing.

9:26

I've done that for one of my own URLs for something that I used to highly recommend

9:32

that then disappeared and the company owes me a lot of money for affiliate sales that

9:39

I referred to them and they never paid me that money.

9:42

And the company just outright disappeared. The person disappeared.

9:44

I can't find them. So I don't know what happened.

9:47

But my redirects for that thing now point to a different page explaining why I no longer

9:54

recommend that thing and instead recommend a different thing.

9:57

So that kind of thing could be really important to both your audience and any kind of affiliate

10:04

income you hope to make. If all of your links break, then you're not going to earn anything from them.

10:10

But if you can point them to the new version or update those links, you can then make sure

10:15

that they work even for the people who previously visited your link.

10:18

They will still be taken to the correct location if they visit that link again.

10:23

And by the way, I know in Pretty Links Pro and another plugin I'm going to mention in

10:28

a little bit, Redirection plugin, you can set the redirection type if you want it to

10:33

be a temporary or a permanent. So general rule, temporary for anything that points to anything you don't control.

10:42

Caution number three, most redirects bypass content.

10:46

This is both a caution and actually a blessing.

10:49

However your redirect is placed, and I'm not referring to the iTunes new feed URL RSS

10:55

tag, because that's not actually a redirect, that's an RSS tag, the redirect will be

10:58

followed before any of that URL's content is loaded.

11:04

So if your redirect is your old podcast RSS feed pointing to a new podcast RSS feed, anything

11:12

you put in that old feed will be completely ignored.

11:16

That's a caution because it means your audience won't get anything you put in that feed.

11:21

Especially not any announcement of the feed change, if that's even necessary, which usually

11:26

it's not necessary to announce that your feed changed.

11:29

If you're redirecting your old feed to your new feed, podcast apps will just follow it.

11:33

So you don't have to tell your audience and you certainly don't have to try and put an

11:37

announcement episode out in your old feed because if you're redirecting your old feed

11:41

that announcement episode won't even be downloaded.

11:45

This is why you should put the iTunes New Feed URL RSS tag in your new feed if you ever

11:52

change podcast feed URLs.

11:54

And yes, the tag should actually point to itself, the RSS feed URL that it is in, as

12:03

a sort of confirmation that this is the new feed URL.

12:09

That's why the tag is called New Feed URL.

12:11

It can be used as a sort of redirect, but really the best thing to do is redirect to

12:16

a new feed and in that new feed is where this new tag goes.

12:21

You don't put this new feed URL in your old RSS feed if your old RSS feed is redirecting

12:27

because this tag won't even be loaded.

12:30

The redirect will simply be followed. This tag is more of a confirmation that the redirect has already been followed.

12:37

It's like I feel that it's mostly Midwestern drivers who do this, who use their turn signal

12:43

to indicate and confirm that they have already changed lanes.

12:48

Just in case you were wondering, "Did you just change a lane?

12:50

Oh, I see. Yeah, you turned on your turn signal there to indicate that you did already just change lanes."

12:57

That's what the new feed URL tag does.

13:00

But this is also a blessing because it means you don't actually need an RSS feed to exist

13:05

at that address once you're redirecting it. In fact, you can have nothing at that address

13:13

except the redirect. That's how nearly all redirection tools do it anyway. You don't have

13:19

to create pages or posts to redirect. You simply create the redirect. And the server intercepts

13:25

that request for that particular path or domain and it redirects without loading any of the content

13:32

from that page. If you want or need to give some information before the redirect, then create a

13:39

page at that URL you share and then have the redirect linked from that page. For example,

13:48

that's where I've been building for a lot of the podcasting tools I frequently recommend.

13:52

Consider Captivate for example. If you visit theaudacitytopodcast.com/captivate to sign up for

13:58

Captivate podcast hosting, which I do highly recommend, you're no longer immediately

14:03

redirected to my affiliate link for Captivate.

14:06

But instead, you land on my page that briefly explains why I recommend Captivate.

14:12

And I can turn that page into a bigger resource page, like maybe eventually showing demonstrations

14:18

or comparisons or little tutorials or anything like that on that page before you actually

14:23

sign up for Captivate. And then you can click on a button on that page to use my affiliate link to sign up for Captivate.

14:33

And fun fact, that button is still a redirect.

14:37

Instead of theaudacitytopodcast.com/captivate it is theaudacitytopodcast.com/go/captivate.

14:46

But what I use anywhere else, emails, show notes, if I say something in a podcast, I

14:52

I would just say the /captivate link, not the /go/captivate because the /captivate takes

14:58

people to my special page.

15:00

It used to go straight to my affiliate link, but now it goes to a page and that page has

15:07

a link to my affiliate link.

15:09

Caution number four. You might someday rename your redirect.

15:13

I've previously shared why you should stop saying brand names in your podcast.

15:18

If you haven't heard that episode, go back and listen to it.

15:21

I highly recommend it. I've got a link to it in the notes for this episode as well at theaudacitytubepodcast.com/redirectcautions.

15:29

But you should probably not say brand names, unless absolutely necessary.

15:34

Maybe you heard or read that and decided to change your /patreon redirecting URL to a

15:40

generic /support URL or something else, or you had some similar situation where you were

15:45

telling people visit / and a brand name, so you changed it to / some generic term.

15:51

While that's great that you did that, it still breaks all your past calls to action

15:57

that used that /patreon URL or whatever that brand name URL was.

16:02

For this reason, if you ever want to someday rename your redirect, regardless of whether

16:07

you've only typed it in your notes or you've also spoken it in your podcast, I highly recommend

16:13

that you make a new redirect and point both the new and old redirects to the correct location.

16:21

And take this chance to ensure they're both 307 or 302 temporary redirects as long as

16:26

you're editing them. Alternatively, you could actually point one redirect to the other. So instead of always

16:33

having to change the destination for multiple redirects, and all of these multiple redirects

16:38

going to the same one link, you only change the last one. But just don't get crazy with this.

16:46

I recommend making no more than two or three layers of a redirect. So that could look something

16:52

like this. /patreon, your original URL that you shared, redirects to /support, that's the new URL,

17:00

and then that is redirecting to that final destination, whatever it is, whether it is

17:05

still Patreon with something else. And we could put "final" in quotation marks when referring to

17:11

that final destination because it's possible that even that URL gets redirected, as actually happens

17:18

with a whole lot of affiliate URLs that bounce through multiple trackers before landing on the

17:24

actual final destination. Caution number five. Correcting URLs you said in old episodes is

17:32

practically impossible. If you do rename a redirect, like switching from /patreon to /support,

17:39

don't even think about editing the audio or video with all your past calls to action.

17:45

This is why it's important to get it right in the first place and make a future-friendly generic

17:52

URL you can change whenever you want without breaking past calls to action. But if you didn't

17:57

plan ahead like that, and I've made that mistake countless times too, make sure all your old calls

18:04

to action still work. That could be either with a redirect or a note and the correct link on the

18:11

resulting destination. So even if you said a patreon.com URL in your podcast and that is not

18:19

a redirect, it's someone else's domain that you shared, someone else's brand name that you pointed

18:24

to in your podcast, even if you shared that, you might be able to leave that page online

18:31

but with a prominent note that your support options have moved and with a link to the

18:35

new location. But make sure that link is also a redirect in case you ever change things again and make

18:43

it a generic redirect that you will always be able to control and change if you need to.

18:49

Question #6. Reusing things you redirected from is a bad idea. And this was my 2024 redirect

18:57

mistake. So I need to illustrate this with a story from my own recent mistake.

19:03

Several years ago, Blueberry launched Podcast Mirror, a free and much better podcast-focused

19:10

alternative to FeedBurner, which would help podcasters who needed the stability and performance

19:16

of a feed always online, distributed through a CDN, and didn't use any of the bandwidth

19:20

of their website, especially PowerPress customers.

19:23

But with all the features coming from Podcasting 2.0 and the dragging feet of many outdated

19:29

podcasting tools and hosting providers (feedburner is actually one of them by the way) Blueberry

19:33

decided to add more features to Podcast Mirror, which could let you add Podcasting 2.0 features

19:41

to a feed that didn't already have them. Just like how we used to recommend using FeedBurner

19:47

to turn a normal blog into a valid podcast feed. And a funny side note, I was actually

19:53

thinking of creating my own service like this as soon as I learned about Podcasting 2.0

19:58

and I even registered a great domain for it but I never got around to building that product.

20:03

And I'm not sure if I ever will. Maybe someday. But who knows.

20:07

These upgrades were great on the Podcast Mirror site, but it also meant that Blueberry would

20:11

stop offering a basic Podcast Mirror service for free.

20:16

Not even their plain Feed Mirror service that they advised so many podcasters to use and

20:23

so many podcasters switched to from FeedBurner.

20:27

And this upgrade to Podcast Mirror went in effect during my few month podcast hiatus

20:32

while I doubled down on launching Podgagement in the second half of 2023.

20:37

So when I published a new episode in January 2024, I faced a news flash.

20:43

My feed wouldn't update anymore because I hadn't upgraded to a paid Podcast Mirror subscription.

20:50

To be blunt, I think this was a horrible betrayal of trust from Blueberry because so many people

20:58

had switched to it because they built it up as this is a free alternative to help you

21:03

keep your podcast online to help with these performance issues on your feed, help with

21:08

this stuff, and I think there might have even been some promises spoken about it always

21:13

being free. So I did feel like this was a betrayal of trust on some level from them.

21:21

But at least all podcasters could easily redirect away from Podcast Mirror. And if you have

21:27

your podcast feed on Podcast Mirror and you haven't updated your podcast, and you haven't

21:33

to a paid subscription, your feed does still work. You just can't publish new

21:38

content to it. So I think that is a balance to this. That it's not like they

21:42

suddenly broke everyone's RSS feeds. That would be horrible. If they did that, then

21:48

Blueberry would be off my recommendations. That would be beyond

21:51

forgiveness. They just did things in a way that I think wasn't the best thing.

21:56

But of course with costs and inflation and all of this other stuff, this might

22:01

have been something that they just had to do.

22:04

So for me, having a tight cash flow, I decided to redirect my podcast mirror feed to a feed

22:10

burner feed and that feed burner feed doing nothing but simply mirroring or proxying my

22:17

feed for performance reasons. And a little side note that you might not have realized, if you put anything in your

22:22

RSS feed and run it through feed burner, feed burner will just pass it straight through

22:27

Unless you use anything in FeedBurner to overwrite that thing.

22:31

So if you, for example, have Podcasting 2.0 features in your RSS feed and you run that

22:36

through FeedBurner, FeedBurner passes those Podcasting 2.0 tags straight through.

22:42

And so they still work in your FeedBurner feed.

22:45

But I very quickly discovered that FeedBurner no longer offers a ping service or a manual

22:53

refresh button, leaving me with no way to trigger an update of my RSS feed.

22:59

So consequently, my episodes were not going out to podcast apps for several hours after

23:06

I published it to my feed. I could look at my source feed and I saw it, the episode is right there.

23:11

And I'd look at the feed burner feed and the episode was not right there.

23:15

It was not there at all for several hours.

23:18

It was very frustrating. So I realized the error of my ways and realized why did I even think I could trust Feedburner again.

23:27

And crazy me, I decided to try building my own feed proxy service.

23:31

But after more than four hours into it, might have even been a whole day of work into it,

23:37

I realized I'd wasted more time, and you know that whole time is money thing, more

23:42

time trying to DIY it and thus lost more potential income than if I'd just paid the reasonable

23:50

yearly fee Blueberry now charges for Podcast Mirror. It's not that much. It's not even

23:56

as much as a podcast hosting account. So I emailed Blueberry on my digital hands and

24:01

knees begging them to take me back. We worked out a deal and I'm back on Podcast Mirror

24:07

now. So hooray for that! But here was my big mistake. I insisted on having my original

24:14

feed URL again. I should not have done that. Why was that bad? Because here's what the

24:20

301 permanent redirects looked like. PodcastMirror was redirecting to FeedBurner and then I set

24:27

FeedBurner to redirect to PodcastMirror, the same PodcastMirror URL. Do you see the problem?

24:35

If anything had cached podcastmirrors301 redirect on my feed, it would enter what's called a

24:40

redirect loop, where it's just this redirecting to that, redirecting back to this, redirecting

24:46

to that, this, that, this, that, this, that, back and forth, back and forth, until apps

24:50

just say "No! Enough!

24:52

We've entered a redirect loop, we're not going to do this anymore, I quit.

24:56

I'm out of here." I suspect this is why I saw a big drop in downloads per episode after I changed the

25:00

redirect. And this was in February 2024, so it had nothing to do with the overhyped iOS 17 update.

25:07

I actually made it even a little worse by momentarily redirecting to my PowerPress feed,

25:13

but not the normal PowerPress feed, but a URL that bypasses any redirects from PowerPress.

25:19

Because I was thinking, well my PowerPress feed was probably 301 redirecting, so I probably

25:23

shouldn't redirect to yet another redirect. So I redirected to the one that bypasses the redirects,

25:29

But then I realized, well, I need to eventually make it so everyone is back on the podcast mirror

25:36

feed. And so this made it really difficult to actually re-redirect when I wanted to. I had to

25:43

go through Cloudflare and do special page rules and other stuff and even just using Cloudflare

25:48

in the process might have broken some things with my RSS feed too. So if by any chance you're hearing

25:55

this and you look at your podcast app and my episodes aren't there, then you might

26:00

be somewhere in this redirect loop. Reach out to me if you've noticed that, but how

26:06

would you know because you might not receive this episode if you're stuck in that redirect

26:11

loop. In all of this, my feed URL didn't actually matter. Do you even know what my

26:18

feed URL is? Did you even know I was using Podcast Mirror? I could have easily added

26:23

a number 2 or Gash audio or anything else to the URL when I rejoined Podcast Mirror

26:30

and it would have been fine. You wouldn't have cared. I could have easily updated my

26:35

text expander snippets and anything that I still had linking to the old Podcast Mirror

26:40

feed I could have easily changed that over or would have just followed the redirect over

26:45

to the correct place, but that's not what I did.

26:48

So the moral of this long story is that if you ever think you should redirect back to

26:53

something that was already 301 permanently redirecting, don't.

26:59

Instead, make a new URL as your final destination.

27:03

And this problem is limited to 301 permanent redirects.

27:07

If all of these redirects were 307 redirects, that wouldn't be a problem because those

27:11

don't get cached. They get checked for where they should go every single time they're loaded, or at

27:17

they're supposed to be. That's the assumption with them and the assumption with 301 is that it's

27:21

checked once and then updated for future redirects. So these six cautions for using redirects are

27:30

caution number one. 301 redirects are permanent and cached. Number two, your redirect destinations

27:37

might change or disappear. Number three, most redirects bypass content. Number four, you might

27:45

someday rename your redirect. Number five, correcting URLs you said in old episodes is

27:51

practically impossible. And number six, reusing things you redirected from is a bad idea.

27:58

Especially if there were 301 permanent redirects. I've got some quick resources for you for making

28:04

redirects in case you're wondering what you should do, how you should make these in the future.

28:08

You can go back to my previous episode about redirects. I've got that link in the notes.

28:12

But here's a quick overview of that and some other stuff.

28:16

First, 301 permanent vs. 307 or 302 temporary.

28:20

With these cautions I shared in mind, my general advice is to choose 307 or 302 temporary redirects

28:27

for any destination you don't control.

28:30

Start with your affiliate links, your donation or membership page, your online community

28:34

and such. And for any destination you do control or you are absolutely certain will not change

28:41

in the foreseeable future, you can use a 301 permanent redirect if you want.

28:46

But you might even then still want a 307, unless you know, I always want it, because

28:51

there's also an SEO benefit to 301 redirects that any kind of SEO benefit that redirect

28:56

URL would get would be passed on to the final destination.

29:00

Second resource, WordPress plugins for making redirects.

29:03

If you are looking to make redirects on WordPress, as I do with my own site which is powered

29:07

by WordPress. My favorite plugins for this are PrettyLinks Pro and Redirection. And I

29:12

actually use both of them together. PrettyLinks Pro, which is a paid plugin and I really like

29:19

it, it's one of my all-time favorite plugins for WordPress, is much easier to use and has

29:24

a lot of helpful features like automatic keyword linking. Like even in the notes for this episode

29:29

where I say PrettyLinks Pro, that is automatically linked with my affiliate link that I didn't

29:34

have to add thanks to Printing Link Pro. It also supports a shorter link creation workflow

29:39

for pages and posts. It offers smart redirects and more. The Redirection plugin, on the other

29:46

hand, is free and it's more advanced, even allowing for regular expressions in your redirects.

29:52

And maybe the handiest feature here with Redirection is that you can enable it to monitor your

29:58

pages and posts to redirect any of those URLs you change to wherever they're supposed to

30:04

go. For example, many of my old episode web pages still include the TAP three-digit number code I

30:11

used to use in my titles. I've removed those from I believe all of my titles now, but I didn't change

30:18

those URLs. So if I did go back and change those URLs, when I have the redirection plugin enabled

30:24

to monitor those URLs for changes, it would then automatically redirect that web page's old URL

30:31

to the new one. I wouldn't have to worry about, "Oh no, I changed the URL for this page. I better

30:37

go back and redirect it." Redirection plugin just takes care of that for me. It's not so easy for

30:42

making those friendly links that you might speak in your podcast, but it is great for some of these

30:47

more advanced things. I have links to both of those in the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/redirectcautions.

30:55

And third resource would be other ways to make redirects. If you're not using WordPress or you

31:01

want to manage your redirects away from WordPress, then look at your domain or website tools and what

31:08

they offer. Or you could consider Cloudflare's options. Some podcast hosting providers or easier

31:14

website builders such as Padpage even offer their own redirect options you can create and manage

31:20

within your dashboard. This would work from only the domain you set to work with that

31:26

website, just like if you were working with WordPress after all.

31:28

The options from your domain registrar, your hosting provider, or Cloudflare generally

31:32

all work before loading anything from your website or server. So the redirects might

31:39

continue to function even if your website is down. And these can work without any website

31:46

at all. I have a domain that I've frequently spoken at podcast conferences for some quick

31:53

notes and things. It's a shorter domain but it's branded to me and there is no actual website at

31:59

that domain. It redirects to my website but there is no website on it. It's simply there for me to

32:06

easily speak a URL at a conference. Lastly, there are plenty of third-party URL shorteners and

32:13

redirect tools you can use, but some might charge if you want to customize the URL or use your own

32:18

domain or they're case sensitive. And even if you can use your own domain, it usually has to be a

32:24

subdomain or a completely different domain from your normal website. You can't have bit.ly pro

32:31

running on your normal website domain. It would have to be a subdomain or a completely different

32:37

domain altogether. And subdomains are basically different domains anyway. They can even point to

32:42

a completely different server instead of pointing to whatever server hosts your normal website.

32:49

Please visit the notes for this episode to review any of the information that I've shared

32:53

and share this episode out. It's at theaudacitytopodcast.com/redirectcautions or you can get to that a simple tap or swipe

33:01

away inside of your podcast app.

33:04

Let's take a brief visit to the community corner. Thanks for the 7,777 sat booster gram

33:10

from Steve Webb on my episode, the previous one, 11 Tips for Sharing URLs in Your Podcast.

33:16

And Steve said, "Another great episode with useful, actionable content."

33:20

Thanks Daniel! Also, a 1000 sat boostergram from Andy Lehman on the same episode and he said, "I tried

33:26

clicking on your links for this episode."

33:28

Remember how I mentioned the whole thing that I was doing with linking specific chapters

33:33

to specific sections of the notes?

33:36

what he was trying to click on and he said it crashed Castamatic. I wonder if it has

33:41

to do with those anchors. And yes it might. So that might be a test. A nice test for any

33:46

podcasting 2.0 app developers is check that episode, 11 tips for sharing URLs in your

33:51

podcast to see what happens if you tap on the links from those chapters. Anything after

33:58

chapter 1 then links to a specific section of my notes. So thank you for those booster

34:03

Also, thanks for the streaming satoshis from Dave Jackson, Brian Inskmeiner, and Dwev,

34:09

also known as Guy Martin now.

34:12

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that support.

34:14

And if you're on a Podcasting 2.0 app and you found that The Audacity to Podcast gives

34:18

you some value in your podcasting, please consider hitting that boost button and picking

34:23

a number that means something to you or that you think this podcast is worth to you.

34:28

Or if you're not using a Podcasting 2.0 app, you could go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/support

34:34

to send a gift through PayPal if you felt this podcast has been valuable to you.

34:39

But the biggest thing that you can do to help is really share this episode out.

34:43

And speaking of sharing episodes, thanks to Andy Lehman for having me on his podcast,

34:48

Podcast Answers, where we talked about podgagement.

34:51

Have you tried podgagement yourself yet? Try it out at podgagement.com.

34:55

Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time

34:59

for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit.

35:04

I'm Daniel J. Lewis from Theaudacitytopodcast.com.

35:08

Thanks for listening.

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