Backlinks. Inbound links. Broken links. Indexed links. SEO thrives or dies on links.<\/p>\n
I’ve been across all of those lately, spending an inordinate amount of time to discover what would have taken a WebMaster a fraction of the time to achieve.<\/p>\n
Firstly I had major issues trying to get Yoast SEO to generate a sitemap which Google WebMaster would recognise. Hours of searching, trial and error led me to try another plugin. Still an issue. Then another plugin. Still an issue. So, I gave up with plugin-land and went old-school.<\/p>\n
If you search online you can generate a nifty little Sitemap Generator<\/a> which will get you underway. I used\u00a0this site<\/a> and in seconds generated an effective sitemap. It was just a matter then of downloading it and re-uploading to the root directory of my website via FTP. Sure, it’s not going to update so I still have to solve the main issue but for now at least Google will crawl my site better.<\/p>\n One of the issues I had was the pesky “index.php” butting itself into my URL as in domainname.tld\/index.php\/anyfile. <\/em>After searching and trying a range of hacks including playing carefully with my htaccess file, I finally realised (*facepalm*) that the permalink structure of WordPress was itself generating the issue. I had set this site up back in 2003 and never bothered to change the permalink structure from what was touted at the time as best practice ie “month\/year\/postname<\/em>“. All the preset options were prefixed by index.php<\/em>. So now I have changed it to Custom and simply have domainname.tld\/postname<\/em> … with no pesky index.php<\/em> intervening. Fingers crossed the online collaboraters were right in saying that WordPress will automatically correct the link changes.<\/p>\n Finally, I realised that even though I had cleaned up my Google Webmaster errors, I may have created a few more after all this farnarcling around.<\/p>\n Instead of looking for yet another plugin to bloat my install I searched for a solution online. I picked Broken Link Checker<\/a> tool and am in the process of verifying the broken links they’ve come up with so I can fix them before Google marks them as errors.<\/p>\n A productive but frustrating 24 hours all-in-all. Playing techo is like being a detective, hunting down the culprit and then trying to arrest them. I think I’ve locked these up until the Judge sets them free.<\/p>\n Tips of the day:<\/p>\n\n