I’ve never had this issue happen before with RapidWeaver.
The links and ads that I have on my website do not work if I go to my website using either two of my iMacs. However, they all work perfect when I use my iPad, Fire, or my desktop PC. Is there any way to fix this? Such an issue is hard for me to comprehend let alone solve.
Any ideas would be appreciated. I use the latest RW and Stacks. Everything is up to date.
Without a link to your site, it’s impossible to see what’s happening.
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Try a different browser on your iMac. They are all free and easy to try.
And post the link 
sorry folks! my website is https://www.inthechickencoop.us.
I have all of the browsers on my computer. Changing the browser didn’t effect the initial issue of the links not working on iMac only. The iPad, the Fire, and the PC desktop all showed the links to work perfectly no matter which browser was used. Just the two iMacs had the problem.
I think I have fixed this issue by just reviewing all of the links on my site, internal and external and either deleting or correcting them. We will see.
I have learned one thing during this issue…that is ‘everything matters’ when building a website!
Thanks for your responses and let me know if the links are active when you visit if you do!
Regards
Seems to be working for me on Chrome/Windows 10. You do have a couple of ‘mixed content’ errors. Not sure if they’d be related but would be good to clean them up just to rule it out.
mixed content?
Thanks jabostick!
Sorry. Links that are http on a site that is https. You can use the browser inspector or just check out whynopadlock.com and have it test your site
mixed content is when you use HTTPS: (SSL) and you have references to HTTP: links.
You can find them easily by checking each page with this web site:
https://www.whynopadlock.com
yes…this happened about a year and a half ago when my provider offered free ‘securtiy’. I chose to buy the full service which was a few dollars more a month for the providers services.
Now I see that when I link to an anchor link that is placed near a profile or person on my website, in the window it always comes up http: not https:. So I assume that I need to change all of the http: reference links?
Thank you teefers! I am running my pages now! I appreciate it!
teefers jabostick et al! Thanks for your assist. I made a huge error (at least a few) when I created my website with RW. The first error was in the naming of my files. For example, for Wendell Orie Lee I created wendellorielee.html. I did not leave spaces, use hyphens or underscores, making my ancestor profile files unrecognizeable to robots. (I assume here only as I don’t have factual knowledge).
So I decided to correct the files and change them to hyphenated names but didn’t think about the files already on the server. So I had two of everything. I started deleting the old ones. At the same time I was doing this I purchased sitemaps.com and I was trying to fix broken links, mixed content et al.
That is when my iMacs started not reacting to hyperlinks on my site. PC’s , iPads and Fire all worked fine. I finally got everything fixed, i thought, but then my pages had to be refreshed to get the links to work. Okay…I know you are all snickering, but I have no training but what I have learned while creating my family tree online.
So, I decided to go back on my time machine to before this all started, weeks before it started to the middle of February. I completely erased my folders and files from the server and uploaded my February website. Everything works perfect. However, my individual ancestor profile files are still without hyphens, underscores or spaces.
Thanks for reading this and my question is now what is your advice on trying to change the file names? Or should I just leave it like it is at https://www.inthechickencoop.us?
I appreciate your feedback!
FWIW, I don’t think you should leave things as they are. You still are having issues with the page names. I don’t know where the page for Wendell Orie Lee (wendellorielee.html) is. Can you point to that exact page?
I tried to find it with your “Seach the Chicken Coop” Google search, and it’s showing the file name as: wendell-orie-lee.html. See below.
When I go to the link it returned, I get a page not found (404) error. I also tried removing the dashes and it still wasn’t found. So, Google has now indexed the page with the hyphens, but that page now no longer exists. That’s not good.
I think you’re going to have to go through with renaming. I would pick a convention that you want to use and then slowly convert your page names over to it. I would track all previous names you used for that page and setup redirects to the new page. Whenever you rename/move pages, you should always setup a redirect form the old name/location to the new one. Google will give you a lot of good info on redirecting pages to new locations. This is important to maintain your page ranking for that page in search results and will ensure that anyone who has that page bookmarked or liked to will still get to the correct page.
As long as your doing this renaming, I would thinking about using unique folders for each page and have the pages named index.html. It used to be that you would name the actual html file. Now it’s much more common to just name the folder and let the file server send the index.html file from the folder. It looks like you are already doing this for many pages (cousins, trees, etc.).
HI Don! Thanks for taking the time to look at my website. I am afraid that I screwed everything up trying to give the profiles of ancestors on my website more exposure on search engines. So, like I said above, yesterday I used my time machine to go back to an early version before I got these grandiose ideas.
Now https://www.inthechickencoop.us is back to the way I had it. As you can see, I have it arranged in family pages, Adams, Alden, Ball et al in individual folders with those names and an index.html file for everyone. That is way I started out before I started to get greedy!
So, now I am reading your post and will study your recommendations on ‘redirects’ and google directions to see if I think I can attempt it. I am afraid that the little bit of knowledge I have dug me deeper in trouble for now I have a lot of 404s from the changes I tried to make, since I didn’t redirect the old ones to the new ones.
Probably, the best thing for me right now is to let the errors all filter out of google and hope that the new sitemaps sent to google will help.
At my level I am not sure that I can complete this task efficiently. For now I will read up on ‘redirects’.
I appreciate your advice and counsel!
Scott
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Scott, setting up redirects is not difficult. It’s just tedious in that you need to keep a list of the old url’s and the new url’s so you know what redirects to setup. You can add them with the Redirect control panel in the Domain section of CPanel (if your hosting uses CPanel). If they use something else, it probably has this ability as well. If not, you can edit the .htaccess file directly and add the redirects.
If you need help setting them up, just post one of the page’s old url’s and the new url and we’ll be able to help you get it setup. Once you have one done, the rest should go easily.
As I mentioned, it is a good idea to set them up whenever you rename/move pages. This helps those pages keep their SEO ranking and allows people and sites that have bookmarked/linked to the page get to it again.
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Thank you Don! Okay, I will give it a go.
I will start with:
Current url: https://www.inthechickencoop.us/trees/adams
Redirect to:
https://www.inthechickencoop.us/trees/judith-adams
On C-Panel I select:
Redirects
On Add Redirects I select:
Type: Permanent (301)
https?://(www.)?: my options in this dropdown menu are 1) inthechickencoop.us
I am selecting that option.
In the / window I am entering the old url “trees/adams”
In the “Redirects To” window I am entering the new url “https://www.inthechickencoop.us/trees/judith-adams”.
The next window is ‘www.redirection’
Here the default is selected for me as ‘Redirect with or without www’.
Is the correct option?
Don, my website is set up with main folders; Home, DNA, Trees, Notables, and Cousins.
The Home page folder under General Settings Meta Data in the Inspector window shows the Browser title which I have “Family Tree and Pedigrees of Lee, Miller, Heath, Lewis and Related Families” (I have never been happy with this description but I couldn’t think of a better one.) The Folder window has nothing in it, and for the Filename I have index.html.
For all the other family pages I have:
Folder: adams
Filename: index.html
Folder: alford
Filename: index.html
and on down the line for each family page.
We are changing these family folder names from the surname i.e. adams to the name of the closest adams family ancestor, i.e. judith-adams etc etc.
All folders have an index.html for that family page.
After I have renamed the family folders from the surname to the ancestor’s name, before uploading to the server I will create the redirects? or after uploading the changes?
I will wait till I hear back from you before I ‘Add’.
Regards,
Scott
Scott,
You need to have the new (renamed) pages up before you redirect the old page url to the new url. If the redirects are in place before you do this, neither the new nor old urls will work and a working page will not load.
If you haven’t yet renamed all the folders for the family pages in RW, I would just change the “adams” folder to "judith-adams” and republish. Then you can set up the redirect for this page.
What you have above for the redirect looks correct. Once added, you should be able to enter “https://www.inthechickencoop.us/trees/adams” in your web browser, and you should up at “https://www.inthechickencoop.us/trees/judith-adams”.
Don,
So this is what I initially did, upload the newly renamed pages. However, I then discovered that they didn’t replace the old ones since they were different names i.e. adams to judith-adams.
After uploading do I go to C-panel and delete the old ones?
Also, after doing this, I most likely need to do redirects for all the names that particular file had i.e. home/trees/adams, trees/adams etc. whatever I see come up on google search that is a 404 I should put in a redirect for that as well as all the redirects that I do initially.
Am I on the right track?
Scott
Also, I will need to check all of the internal links that link to my anchor links I have on the site itself to make sure they have the correct url. Correct?
Scott
Yes. It sounds like you understand the steps.
RW does not delete old pages, so you will have to delete those through CPanel.
-Don