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Monday, June 18, 2007

Erol ships patch fixing deindexing of online stores by Google

If you run an Erol driven store and you suffer from a loss of Google traffic, or you just want to make sure that your store's content presentation is more compliant to Google's guidelines, then patch your Erol software (*ix hosts / Apache only). For a history of this patch and more information click here.

Tip: Save your /.htaccess file before you publish the store. If it contains statements not related to Erol, then add the code shipped with this patch manually to your local copy of .htaccess and the .htaccess file in the Web host's root directory. If you can't see the (new) .htaccess file in your FTP client, then add "-a" to the external file mask. If your FTP client transfers .htaccess in binary mode, then add ".htaccess" to the list of ASCII files in the settings. If you upload .htaccess in binary mode, it may not exactly do what you expect it to accomplish.

I don't know when/if Erol will ship a patch for IIS. (As a side note, I can't imagine one single reason why hosting an online store under Windows could make sense. OTOH there are many reasons to avoid hosting of anything keen on search engine traffic on a Windows box.)

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3 Comments:

  • At Tuesday, June 19, 2007, Blogger JLH said…

    Congrats on getting that done and a good rip on windows boxes. I've still got one site to convert, it's the last remaining ecommerce site in .asp. I'm dreading converting all my own hacks from asp to php, then the nightmare that comes with redirecting thousands of pages. The only way I can think of doing it gracefully would be to convert the existing urls from .asp to folder names slowly, let the search engines catch up. Then install the new system. I don't want to mess with a sitewide revamp in one swoop.

     
  • At Tuesday, June 19, 2007, Blogger Sebastian said…

    You can tell Apache to parse .asp files for PHP to keep the old URLs, but I wouldn't mess with that on IIS. Did/can you move the sites to a unix box?

     
  • At Tuesday, June 19, 2007, Blogger JLH said…

    According to ecommercetemplates they haven't had much luck using the .asp parsing. That was the first thing I looked at, but gave up for some reason I forget right now :)

    Whatever I do, I'm going to test it on a spare domain/host before. It's just low priority right now. Converting from access to sql is probably more important to me than the actual operating system, then you've got the payment gateway crap, ick.

    I also have to get up to speed on the php thing to convert my own special hacks, and remember I'm no programmer. For you it may take 10 minutes, me, 10 days of permutations to get it right.

     

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