G’day gang,
It’s been brought to my attention (by a member) that Googling for the address of a page on a club site brings up an old page which I thought had long since been deleted. Indeed, a search of the files on the server reveals no such file, and a site-wide search of Rapidweaver (Edit>Find in Project) also fails to find the errant page.
I can’t replicate it, though— I get the correct/current page.
Any thoughts? Thanks in anticipation.
GeoffPh
It could be a caching issue on your members browser. Did he share the URL of the outdated page? How did it look to you?
Thanks for the response, Dan. I, too, think it’s probably a cache issue, but she says that it only occurs when she searches for the page via Google. She has sent me screen shots of the two URLs but I don’t know what to make of them. One is correct, and returns the current page, the other (screenshot) is as though it was captured a long time ago.
She is not a confident user, and I’m not sure what platform she uses, so to tell her to empty the cache could be challenging.
Thanks again.
GeoffPh.
Hey @geoffph,
We recently had an example of someone who had a few old pages online still, without realising it.
If you log in using a stand alone FTP client, you’ll see what directories are on your server. There might be an old one still there, that holds similar content to your current site and might still be picked up by Google. You can delete that directory, or better still put a 301 redirect on it for better SEO, and your old site should be gone from Google within a few days.
Cheers,
Erwin
Compare your locally published files (pages) with your uploaded one and you should be able to determine if the page online was actually deleted or remains for viewing. RW does not delete anything when you publish your pages, so simply removing it from your project does not delete it from your server.
Plus, if you post the page here, someone will confirm its existence or not.
Thanks, everybody, for your responses.
I did not fully understand all of them, unfortunately, but I used Cyberduck to access the files on the server, but a search for ‘contact’ (which is part of the delinquent file address, compared to Contact Us’ which is good) did not return anything. Then, when I decided to trawl through manually and all the folders were empty??? Or at least when opened they did not reveal anything.
I used Panthur’s File Manager to search still to no avail.
The delinquent address line is:
[Contact Us | Solos Network]
The good address line is:
[Contact Us | Solos Network Us/index.php]
Interestingly, as I said, it’s only revealed through a Google search, and when the Home button (on the dud page) is clicked it takes the viewer to the correct homepage etc., and the correct Contact Us page is available from that menu bar on that page. Bah!
If I were to delete everything, and republish all files???
PS: I just clicked both those address lines and they BOTH take me to the delinquent page.
Is a puzzlement.
Hi @geoffph,
/FormsInfo/Contact/ is the folder that holds your contact page.
/FormsInfo/Contact/index.php is the full address. the index.php part is the file that is the contact page itself.
So nothing out of the ordinary there. Both need to be there, neither should be deleted.
However, if i look at your site, there’s also /FormsInfo/Contact/index.html present on your server. So you have both index.php and index.html in the folder /FormsInfo/Contact/.
index.html doesn’t contain the contact form itself. As this is the file that is automatically loaded if you do not specify which of the two (php or html) you need, you won’t see the contact form fields appear sometimes.
You should delete the index.html using Cyberduck (only the index.html file - nothing else and not the entire directory!).
Cheers,
Erwin
Thanks Irwin, I’lll study up on the Duck, and give it another shot. That makes sense, it’s just that I’ve searched in the past and can’t find it. I’ll try again.
Thanks again everybody.
Thanks everybody. I’ve got it sorted; I finally found the wretch, deleted it, and that URL now returns a 404. I imagine that that’s correct.
Part of the problem, is that you more experienced blokes speak a different dialect to us mortals.
Thanks again.