Thanks to Purehost and with a little help from me (I can’t shrug off all guilt onto Purehost…much as I’d like to) my father’s website was totally crippled during the short time people come to his website to make their Xmas orders.
Now my dad is also a little to blame,too.He should have alerted that me something was wrong when he noticed that the order rate dried up(sometime around Dec 3rd) the same time I launched the new paypal integrated shop,along with a new site and blog design. But it was not until yesterday the 14th with Christmas less than 2 weeks away that he let me in on this fact.
Despite my best efforts not to serve up 404’s due to the new design and site restructure(I’d used the url redirect tool Purehost offers, for each and every url that was being retired)-searches from Google were serving up blank pages.Not even 404 messages. Just blank white screens.Because I had directory browsing turned on-the browser went to the directory but couldn’t find the file. Of course it couldn’t. I had moved it. But I had used the URI redirect tool! I had taken every measure I thought I had at my disposal to protect my dad’s site from losing visitors.
Since the site is on IIS- .htaccess won’t work. The best I could do was move those files back where they used to be and create a message within each document to go to the new store. For about 30 files. What a horror. Then with his old blog (I switched him to WP) I put a PHP 301 redirect script in the index.php file in the directory his old blog was in, redirecting traffic to the new blog. Unfortunately the damage is done. My repairs are too late to save his business for this season.What a nightmare.
So how did I even access Purehost’s URl redirect tool IF it isn’t available to their WINDOWS platform customers? You got me there.Well, I was searching the “knowledge base” (more like the disinformation base) for .htaccess and a link took me to the redirecting tool where I spent a painstaking hour or two combing through the directory finding all the old urls and redirecting them to the new urls…and to have it all go to poop really hurts.Here I was trying to HELP my dad and I ended up killing his site for the one and only time of the year he gets online orders. I could bite someone. I really could.
So all day I worked on improving his SEO. I used Google’s Webmaster Tools to perform diagnostics-found and requested removal of 404 generating links-and loaded some of the books to Google base.
I loaded a better robots.txt. And I combed the web looking for mentions of my father’s site or his books or the Stone Street Press.And then I wrote to those people and asked them to link to his site.Whew.
My father recently turned 70. When I took on the maintenance of his site I had one goal in mind:to make his site make him some money so he could stop having to go to book fairs to sell his books. A strenuous task for anybody of any age. I wanted the balance to lean toward online sales and away from the physical demands of book fair sales. In my rosey ideal world by now his site would’ve been well indexed,well visited with firm and long standing linkage.And everyone would buy HIS books from him instead of all those scalpers who resell his books for 500 percent profits.They get away with it because his web site for so long wasn’t functional.There was no SEO to speak of. Those “competitors” have been selling his books online for years.I only just started improving the site last year.
So basically the book buying world wants his books they just don’t know how to find him. I am really trying to change that.