I said on Tuesday that I liked the new re-design by the Free Press.
You know what? I changed my mind. Here's why:
Sure, it looks good, but they didn't anticipate (or perhaps just didn't care) about how their new URL structure would break all their old links. So all those old Free Press articles I've cited now point to 404 Not Found error pages. Just my problem, right? Well, all the 508,000 links in the Google index also point to 404 error pages, too. I get a large percentage of my traffic from Google, and with over half of a million pages indexed, I'm going to guess that the Free Press does, too. Sure, you can use the Google cache to view the old article for now, but what happens once that cache is flushed out?
There are ways to handle these types of re-directs, and it looks like the Free Press dropped the ball.
A link that used to work [Detroit Free Press]