Check the comment above under “Chad Bush”. He explains what he did, and I respond. I think that adds a lot of the context you are looking for.

It’s been a while since I did this. I run my own WordPress instance, so it’s a bit easier for me to look at the database and view the GUID and post_id. What kind of WP instance are you using?

Nick

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Great post – thanks for this since I haven’t found anything else out there that explains how to fix it this clearly. One question – I use permalinks, and can’t figure out the GUID of my cached deleted posts.

Chad’s comment: “I’ve always used pretty permalinks, so my post ID has never been in the post URL, but I was able to find the post ID by viewing the source of cached post single pages, since I have the ID of each post listed as an ID for the div that contains the post.”

Can you please explain the above – I just don’t understand how he was able to figure out the old GUID for deleted posts since they were permalinks (without the ID in the post).

Thanks.

My success with 2 posts, and other’s discussing this indicate that it should work and replace the prior post. I’ve done minor updates and typo corrections and have seen those publish to Reader as well.

I’m not sure what is different in your case. Are you sure you got the correct post_ids? If not, are there any prior backups of your database that might have them? I run automated weekly backups on my blog database that I can look at if necessary.

I just looked at my WP database again, and noticed a few things.

Make sure the GUIDs match. WordPress keeps revisions, and maybe you changed the wrong new post you were going to change? From the looks of it, post_type=post as opposed to revision is a simple way to tell.

Also, remember that anything that goes on your site, then goes into your feed, which is then polled by Google Reader. Have a look at the raw feed and double check that it’s showing what you expect. If you that quickly enough you can probably unpublish and refresh your feed before Reader picks it up.

Reading the other comments on the net on this issue I notice some people had issues with their posts appearing at the top of their feed. I did not- I even backdated the post and it moved further into the background of my feed.

However, Google Reader has a “published” and “received” date, and often sorts by received, so that might be the influence.

Final though- different feeds may react differently. I was doing my feeds through Feedburner. Maybe that has an effect?

I hope you have luck sorting this out- I realize how frustrating and painful it is. Send me some links to the feed if you want me to peek at it.

I did find the post ID numbers for some of my old, deleted posts in Google’s cache for my site. I’ve always used pretty permalinks, so my post ID has never been in the post URL, but I was able to find the post ID by viewing the source of cached post single pages, since I have the ID of each post listed as an ID for the div that contains the post.

It appears to me that WordPress by default, whether I have pretty permalinks set up or not, issues a GUID for each post in this format: http://website.com/?p=POSTID. Does that sound correct?

If so, I’m able to reconstruct the GUID for some of my deleted posts in my database. However, as soon as I change from Draft to Published status on the new and scrubbed replacement posts, it seems that Google Reader makes note of the date I modified the post, and by default it sorts by that date rather than the publication date I’ve set for the post. Can you think of any way around this?

Also, it seems that even with the new ID that should duplicate the GUID on older posts, Google is listing my replacement posts as new posts instead of replacing the older ones. Now I have a long list of test posts at the top of my feed. Yikes!

I really appreciate any additional help you might offer with this. I’m surprised at the dearth of information about this matter, since I’m sure a lot of other people have ended up with this issue. Hopefully my comments and your replies here will help others in need.

Thanks for the comment! It was a serious issue for me, just having launched my blog, and I didn’t find any detailed explanations so I figured it was worth documenting.

The GUID is created by your blogging software, and then used by Google Reader. Usually it uses the post_id and the domain name.

So,if I go to Google Reader, find the post, and click through, I get the url:
http://testdrivenmarketing.com/343/how-to-manage-the-coming-content-explosion

which would allow me to reconstruct the GUID.

Looking in my WordPress table, the guid is found in the “guid” field of wp_posts, e.g.
http://testdrivenmarketing.com/?p=343

In the case where it didn’t exist, I created a new post in draft state, manually changed the guid to match, and then published.

If you have Analytics or logs you could also scan there for people who tried to click through from Google Reader.

Unfortunately, this would not work if you don’t have the post_id in your url. I just did a quick look at Google Reader and html, and I’m not sure what to do in that case. I’ll look some more and let you know if I find anything.

Regards,
Nick