Strange permalink redirects

Check your permalinks settings (they should be Day and Name), and then click Save Changes even if you haven’t changed anything.

Thanks. This hasn’t fixed the problem. I’m frightened to change the Permalink structure because there’s a redirect in place from my old WordPress.com site. But do you think this would fix things?

Your site is working fine for me and all the URLs are correct. Try emptying your browser cache.

Does the problem only occur when you are being redirected from your old wordpress.com site? When loaded directly, your new site works fine.

The site loads OK from outside. The links on the front page are fine. The sidebar links are fine. But if you look at this page:

https://billbennett.co.nz/2008/11/15/starting-a-business-folly-or-fortune/

The link at the bottom of the text: Bad economy good time for business start-up?

has the wrong format:

https://billbennett.co.nz/2008/11/15/2008/10/18/a-bad-economy-can-be-a-good-time-for-a-start-up-business/

It works, but it’s worrying. I think this is why I’ve been given a Google Page Rank of Zero. Previously my page rank hovered between 4 and 5.

Oh, the problem is with using relative links like this:

href="../2008/10/18/a-bad-economy-can-be-a-good-time-for-a-start-up-business/"

Relative links do not work with WordPress. You need to use absolute links (those with https://billbennett.co.nz in them).

The links are written as absolute links. This happens somewhere after they are put on the page.

Could this be what’s happening to you too?

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/228843

Yes, that’s possibly the problem. I’m definitely entering absolute addresses and they are changing to relative addresses.

I’ll try editing a few in Internet Explorer to see if the problem is down to Firefox.

OK, it’s definitely not a Firefox problem. I just fixed a number of links using Internet Explorer and they changed back to relative address as before.

Any new lines of investigation?

A plugin, especially some sort of linking, formatting, or editor type of plugin may be involved. Try temporarily disabling all plugins and seeing if the problem goes away.

Thanks. Yes. It’s a plug-in doing the damage. I’ve got 21 installed, so finding the right one could be difficult.

In case it helps others later, I’ll report back when I’ve tracked the cuplrit.

It looks very much as if the problem is John Godley’s Redirection plug-in. I’ll try contacting John’s support to see if there’s a fix.

It looks very much as if the problem is John Godley’s Redirection plug-in.

Thanks for reporting back on this. Others may have the same mysterious problem.

This is very frustrating. The relative addressing reoccurred overnight.

Which means it’s not the Redirection plug-in causing the problem.

Yesterday I selectively turned off plug-ins to see which ones changed the addressing, but the process appears to happen so slowly its hard to tell the guilty plug-in.

Well this explains why the problem was so difficult to track – I disabled the broken link checker plug-in and all the relative links changed back to absolute links.

I’m going to post a message in the plug-ins and hacks forum.

Thanks Iridiax for your help.