Not sure when it started happening, but if you scroll to the bottom of the 7minutemiles.com home page and hover over the “Older posts” link, the URL shows as 7minutemiles.com/page/2. My web server, though, is redirecting that back to 7minutemiles.com via an Apache 301 redirect. Not good.
The older posts can be viewed by using a different URL – 7minutemiles.com/?paged=2 for the second page of posts, 7minutemiles.com/?paged=3 for the third page, and so on. So at least I know they are still there.
This type of problem is usually related to the Permalinks section in WordPress Settings and the .htaccess file it manipulates. I checked out the current .htaccess file, recreated it, restored an old version from backup to compare and tried various structural settings within the admin section (default works, but I want my standard day and name URLs that match what Google has indexed).
What’s weird is that pagination within category pages works fine (i.e. – 7minutemiles.com/category/golf/page/2 for example). My web server log isn’t throwing any errors and seems to be configured the same as it ever was (no recent upgrades). I did have a few Jetpack plugin upgrades recently, but deactivating that made no difference. I’m also not using any add-in pagination plugins.
A WordPress support site had a few threads mentioning that the 3.4 upgrade changed some things with pagination, but I’m pretty sure it was working since I moved to the 3.4.x series (currently on 3.4.2). My issue is a little different than that post, plus you wouldn’t think you’d need a function.php fix for basic pagination on the home page. Here is my theme PHP code that generates the link:
next_posts_link('« Older posts')
That generates the right URL, so I’m confused as to whether this is a WordPress issue or an Apache issue. Guess I’ll look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow…