Hi Len,
On 23 Feb 2012, at 17:40, Len email@hidden wrote:
This is a serious issue that has plagued my site since its inception. At first I had traffic and my keywords were tracking on the first or second page of Google–always in the top 20 returns. Then after two weeks I had no traffic. I was puzzled. I decided to try one of those services that checks your keyword rankings and your sight for SEO problems. Boy, were there problems!
Sorry to hear you’re having problems. I’ve got to say that it seems very odd that this multiple file generation problem would cause your Google ranking to slip by that much, if at all, if I’m honest. Superfluous files that aren’t connected to your site in any way – I’m making an assumption here, but when the Action generates a new file it removes the link to the old one, even if it’s incorrectly leaving it there – shouldn’t affect the rank of existing pages with meaningful content on them. And by meaningful, I mean content that relates to the main subject of your site – whatever that may be.
And due to another issue–mentioned elsewhere in this forum–of even minor changes to the site resulting in a complete, or near-complete site re-uploads, taking 2 hours or more
This should hopefully have been alleviated by a recent fix – in 5.6.4, I believe – so if you’re still having problems with that, let us (Softpress) know.
–(how about a nice tutorial on setting up a ‘down-for-maintenance-page’, so I can say “be back up in about 2 hours”… seriously … how do I do that?),
Great idea. We’ll try and put something together.
Why should I have to manually go into the directory on the server and clean there files out? They shouldn’t be produced in the first place.
Freeway does actually keep track of files that it created, and if they get removed from the site, they also get removed from the server. In some instances – such as when some Actions generate files – this doesn’t happen. It should happen, so if it doesn’t in Actions that we make, or that we recommend using, we’ll look into it.
I brought this issue up months ago, and tech did delve into it, but there has been no solution offered. At no point has tech here suggested it is a server issue, which is good, because my host company agrees, confirming that other than these erroneous .php files, there are no other anomalies with my directories or files.
I can only apologize, about that. It should have been raised further and looked into. I think one of the key things preventing that from happening was that the Action isn’t developed by us. Though, since it’s one we recommend it, we should have escalated the issue.
I am not a programmer so I try to tread lightly on topics of which I am nearly completely ignorant. But I also notice that the Simple Search action can create a lot of meaningless hits if the search word or phrase also happens to coincide with the text of CSS menu items. Since the menu is a master item and appears on every page of my site, every page of the site becomes a result, albeit with an appropriately lower score. Annoying.
Seems like there should be a way to discriminate menu text from content. I realize Simple Search is a simple tool, but…
We introduced a way to remove pages, and individual items from the Simple Site Search a few versions ago. They’re pretty simple, just apply the Remove from Simple Site Search Actions to anything you don’t want being searchable.
(stepping boldly now into making a leap-of-illogic observation?)… I noticed when I looked at the urls of the fictional .php pages being produced, they seem to be full of a bizarre common series of illogical, incorrect, non-existent links to pages that should not be related or linked in any way. So I’ll boldly look stupid and ask if there might be some potential issue with CSS that might also be in play with the creation of these
fictional pages?
Hmm, what are the names of the pages being generated? If they end in “go.php” then they are the cause of the original poster’s problem. In which case, the solution will be a fix to the Action. If not, then you might be suffering from something else.
Specifically, all my pages are CSS-active. Should the Contact page using this action have CSS deactivated? Could this be the problem? If so what happens to the rest of my page layout (i.e., it has many common elements with every other page of the site which are CSS-active)?
Nope, that’s all normal. CSS Active (or CSS Layout mode) simply means that all items drawn will use CSS to position them on the page. When this mode is inactive, all items are positioned using good ol’ fashioned tables (great for creating emails newsletters).
I don’t care if I look ignorant and/or stupid. I wish the problem was something stupid I did so I could be told what it is, fix it, and be resurrected from the dead, which I am to Google. I need these issues solved and so does anyone else going through this–most, probably oblivious that it is also happening to them.
You don’t look ignorant or stupid. The problem seems to simply be a bug in an Action. As for the Google issues, I think that must be something completely unrelated. Feel free to ping me off-list with some information about it (site name, what you’re searching for, that kind of thing) and I’ll happily look into it for you.
Hope this helps!
Joe
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options
