Drupal Follow, No Follow Option
Feb 11th
I have been working on WordPress sites for a couple of years now, but picked up a new account that has their site built in Drupal. While optimizing the website I ran across a nice little feature that controls the robots.txt file. If you’re not familiar with the importance of the robots.txt file, basically it tells the search engine which pages on your site are ok to index.
While going through my clients site today, I noticed that on each page the robots.txt file was set to no index, no follow. When Google, Yahoo or Bing come across this page, this little robots.txt file is telling them, “don’t index me and don’t follow me”! Well if you tell the search engines not to follow your website, then it will never be found during the search as you are telling them to remove the page from the search engines database!
Be sure to set up the robot.txt file TO follow and index each page of your website. Your be glad you did when the phones starts to ring as users are finding you on Google.
For you WordPress users, there is a plug-in that will create a robots.txt file for your website.
For more information on the robots.txt file, go to robotstxt.org.
What I Don’t Like About WordPress
Feb 11th
I am a big fan of self hosted WordPress sites as they are easy to setup and end users can learn how to update and manage their own site with minimal training. In fact my website and this blog are both WordPress sites that have been custom designed and coded to give the sites a unique and individual look.
However, you may notice that right now this blog page looks like crap and doesn’t have any of the custom coding that www.simplebizsupport.com has (this blog site should look identical to my primary website). This is because I accidentally “updated” the template the site was build from and it wiped out all the custom coding. Now, if you don’t understand what a template is or how to custom code a site, that’s ok. What you do need to know is that if you mess around with the back end of the site and make changes, it could have a drastic negative affect.
So, here’s what I don’t like about WordPress…why couldn’t they have put in a line of code that when you go to update a template, it reminds you that doing so will wipe out any customization and do you want to continue? Not only would it have saved me a headache, but a couple hundred dollars to have the site fixed!
