ergophobe - 7:34 pm on Apr 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

I thought WP was supposed to be handling this better.

You could try the Redirection plugin. It will let you 301 or 302 anything - page addresses, aff links, whatever.

I use the Headspace2 plugin because it allows me many things. Some premium themes have similar features. OTTOMH,

- custom excerpts (to avoir dupe content)
- custom read more text (for varied anchor text)
- custom meta description tags
- custom meta titles that are not the same as post title
- complete follow/nofollow and index/noindex control (for boilerplate, category pages, etc)
- simple integration of Google Analytics, Mint, WMT and many others, but most useful for the analytics because you can keep admin visits out of the count, which is useful for a new, low-traffic site.
- first time visitor notice - if user doesn't have cookie, show special welcome message
- lots of other features.