URGENT HELP needed

437 Posts

distant_smile Reply #11, 15 years, 5 months ago

Thanks esnyder. I have tried the 503 rewrite my htaccess reads as follows

# For full documentation and other suggested options, please see
# http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/MODx096/Friendly+URL+Solutions
# including for unexpected logouts in multi-server/cloud environments
# and especially for the first three commented out rules

#php_flag register_globals Off
#AddDefaultCharset utf-8
#php_value date.timezone Europe/Moscow

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / 


# Fix Apache internal dummy connections from breaking [(site_url)] cache
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^2\.220\.239\.47*$ 
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

# Rewrite domain.com -> www.domain.com -- used with SEO Strict URLs plugin
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# Exclude /assets and /manager directories and images from rewrite rules
RewriteRule ^(manager|assets)/*$ - [L]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=(.*)\.html$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/%1.php? [R=301,L]
# For Friendly URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URL} !^/maintenance\.php$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /maintenance.php [L]

# Reduce server overhead by enabling output compression if supported.
#php_flag zlib.output_compression On
#php_value zlib.output_compression_level 5

can’t get it to work, where am i going wrong?

www.PawsForWildlife.co.uk
www.Borntobrick.co.uk

863 Posts

Lucas Reply #12, 15 years, 5 months ago

Did you create the maintenance.php file and place it in your root folder? Might be easiest to just duplicate and rename your MODx .htaccess file temporarily and just use the exact example from that link instead. Change your IP of course so you can still access your pages (you might need to turn off friendly urls in MODx).

Once you’ve got this sorted, you should look into installing MAMP (Mac) or WAMP (Windows) so you can develop on your home computer instead of a live site. wink

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318 Posts

freejung Reply #13, 15 years, 5 months ago

Sorry I missed this, I’m not sure what was going on with the 503 but your site appears to be up and working now, with friendly URLs and the 301 redirect correctly installed. Notice that if you click on one of your listings in Google, it takes you to the appropriate page with the new friendly URL. Excellent.

Edit: apparently I spoke too soon, I was seeing your site just fine a minute ago, now it’s giving a 500 server error. What’s going on now?

437 Posts

distant_smile Reply #14, 15 years, 5 months ago

Oay. I now have my deleted files...I think. Have re-uploaded everything via Filezilla. When I try to access my homepage I get a 500 - Internal error, which I guesss is where my web provider is still processing my upload? I seem to have lost all of my images I uploaded via the FCK editor. When download from Filezilla the thumb images appear as blocky colourful squares, not my photos. Any ideas?

www.PawsForWildlife.co.uk
www.Borntobrick.co.uk

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318 Posts

freejung Reply #15, 15 years, 5 months ago

Well, looks like the 500 error is resolved, and the redirect is still working. I’m not sure what’s going on with the FCK editor thumbnails. Maybe there’s some way to force it to update the thumbnail cache?

437 Posts

distant_smile Reply #16, 15 years, 5 months ago

I think...and I say this with EVERYTHING crossed...I may be back to normal. Phew! Thanks Esnyder, regards to your earlier post dont feel bad you didnt lead me down a dangerous path. I went to upload the new .htaccess file and saw a folder in Filezilla I didnt think belonged there, completely my own fault!!! Thanks for the advice on 301 direct though, looks like its working now, I will be sure to add your name to my acknowledgements page wink

www.PawsForWildlife.co.uk
www.Borntobrick.co.uk

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318 Posts

freejung Reply #17, 15 years, 5 months ago

Awesome, and thanks! Too bad you don’t link your acknowledgements ;-)

Two quick tips, since you seem to care about SEO:

Get more links. By far your biggest SEO weakness is simple lack of link juice. Any effort you put in to getting links from other sites will have vastly more impact on your search rankings than anything you can do by fiddling around with URL structure and meta tags and stuff like that. Find an answer to the question, "why would other webmasters link to this site?" Open Site Explorer is a great tool for tracking your efforts in this regard.
Some of your keyword targeting may be a bit ambitious, at least until you get a lot more links. You might be able to make it to the first page for "Camelot Macaw" (you’re on page 3 now), but you’re never going to rank for "African Elephant." Try to find longer keyword combinations to target and put these in your titles. The Google Adwords keyword tool is very valuable for this.

You have a lot of great text content, and you should be able to get lots of long tail traffic. I could take a lesson from that, actually -- your site has a lot more in the way of descriptions and scientific information than I do. I should try to flesh out my photo captions a bit! Setting up TVs for stuff like species and hybrids and that sort of thing is a great idea.

437 Posts

distant_smile Reply #18, 15 years, 5 months ago

Thanks Esnyder. When you say about linking my acknowledgements, I would be happy to link it if you have a site? With regards to keywords I do get confused. At present my meta tags automatically takes my introtext as keywirds. For example...

<meta name="keywords" content="[*introtext*]" />

Maybe I could add another area of modx for keywords such as longitile or menu title?

I also have an external links page. I add a bit of text, just describing the site and a link so tell me a little about your site and the address and I will add it, my way of a thank you for your help

www.PawsForWildlife.co.uk
www.Borntobrick.co.uk

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318 Posts

freejung Reply #19, 15 years, 5 months ago

The meta keywords tag is useless. Personally, I wouldn’t even bother to have it. Search engines do not use it as a ranking factor, and haven’t for years.

I’m talking about your <title> element, which is the most important part of the page for SEO and should contain your primary target keywords. It doesn’t really matter where you get the <title> element, using the long title field usually makes sense. The important thing is that it be targeted to keyword phrases that you might be able to rank for. For example, instead of just "African Elephant" you might use something like "African Elephant Facts and Information" which would be an easier phrase to rank for, and still includes the main phrase "African Elephant."

This is becoming a lecture on SEO -- but I love to lecture about SEO, so that’s OK as long as you’re listening wink

I was mostly kidding, you don’t have to link to me (although if you do, you can use any of my pictures for your site). My site is in my sig: http://www.freenaturepictures.com. It’s somewhat similar to your site, except heavier on the pictures and lighter on text information, which is one of the strengths of your site. At the moment I’m #2 for "nature pictures" although I was #1 for years until Fabulous Nature took my spot -- I’m still working on figuring out how they did that! If you feel like linking to me that’s fine, but it’s not terribly important, I already have thousands of links.

437 Posts

distant_smile Reply #20, 15 years, 5 months ago

I’m happy to add you on external links, it’s a nice site! I have tried for an example to change my title tag. It now reads (the example is for the page cavapoo)

<title>DOG - Cavapoo - Pawsforwildlife.co.uk Facts and information</title>

Is this the sort of thing that you meant?

www.PawsForWildlife.co.uk
www.Borntobrick.co.uk