By Rich Brooks
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-07-06
After 13 years developing web sites you'd think I'd have seen it all. No such luck, as the Interwebs continue to surprise me. Recently we revamped a web site for Hatch Billiards, a maker of custom pool tables and billiards furniture. We took it from being a static brochureware web site and ported it to WordPress so that Hatch Billiards could update and maintain the site in house. As part of that conversion, all .html pages were renamed as .php pages.
Whenever you do a major revamp where page URLs are changing, it's best practice to use a 301 redirect or mod_rewrite to help reduce any temporary loss in search engine visibility.However, after the revamp traffic to the site was down. We could see that the site had been indexed by the search engines, but the contact page was ranking higher than the home page, an odd and unwelcome situation.
As it turned out, there was an odd bit of code in the htaccess file (sorry if I'm getting a bit geeky here, wikipedia definition of htaccess) that was telling the server to deliver the non-existent .html page rather than the .php page.
What made diagnosing this even trickier was that when people visited the page they saw what they should, but when search engine spiders visited the page they received a 403 error, telling them that access to the page was forbidden.
It was only because a friend of our client pointed out that when he tried tools like Website Grader the site couldn't be found. That led us to realize people and non-human agents were receiving different experiences, and we then checked the htaccess file where the code was hiding. While we're not sure why the code was there in the first place, it only took a couple of minutes to remove it. Hopefully the search engines will be returning more relevant results by the time you read this.
It was an important lesson for us to learn, and we feel bad that it caught us by surprise at the cost of traffic to Hatch Billiard's web site, at least in the short run.
So, if you're in the market for a custom pool table, or want some furniture for your billiards room, be sure to check out our friend Howard's site. You'll be glad you did.
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