Tekpals

Sometimes we step in a big pile ourselves and we thought it would be useful to share what recently happened to the Tekpals site and what we can learn from our mistake.

Google Webmaster tools is a suite of tools to give you information on the health and ‘searchability’ of your site. We recommend that all website owners regularly use these tools to find problems with their site. (We’ll cover all the major features of Google Webmaster tools in future blog entries.)

So, we usually follow our own advice and took a look at the Tekpals site using Webmaster tools. One of the pages we look at is crawl errors, which shows pages that the Google search crawler tried to find but couldn’t. Take a look at the highlighted line in the screen image. (We added the highlighting.)

That line tells us that 49 pages are linked to www.tekpals.com/index.html and that this page couldn’t be found. Yikes!

So what happened? A few days before, we changed our site from a custom html/css site to WordPress. The index.html page is the main home page that usually loads whenever anyone types in www.tekpals.com. (Usually a web server will automatically load index.html then, if that file isn’t found, it will look for a few others.) WordPress doesn’t use index.html; it uses a different file – in our case it looks for index.php – which it found. So our site was loading correctly whenever someone typed in www.tekpals.com, but if someone typed in www.tekpals.com/index.html, they would get a Page Not Found message.

So, there were 49 existing links that were looking for the old index.html file. We needed to fix this problem and we can’t change the links on other sites. An additional challenge is that WordPress doesn’t need an index.html file and if we created one, it would just confuse things. So we used a web server feature called redirection to direct anyone looking for index.html to go get index.php instead. This solved the problem. If someone types in (or clicks on a link to) www.tekpals.com/index.html they’ll still get the default home page even though the file index.html doesn’t exist. The user isn’t even aware of the redirection (unless they’re really paying attention.) Problem solved!

The lesson here isn’t about the technical details of what happened and how it was fixed. The lesson is to pay attention to your site and use some commonly available tools to monitor the health of your site.