Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

[Gary Lewis]

Well, swell. I did add the General Brake Service file to Weebly and embedded it on the Brakes page. And then I told Freefind to index the site. It is now done and Freefind does find the phrase listed above.

HOWEVER, it actually finds the file itself tucked away in the directory here: www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/GeneralBrakeService.pdf. But it was supposed to find it on the page at Documentation/Driveline/Brakes, which it hasn't done.

Given that, I went back to the search on the C6 and now I realize it is doing the same - finding the file in the directory (www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/FordC6RebuildProcedures.pdf) rather than on the page. Close, but no cigar.

The issue is that while the user can find the document, s/he doesn't really know where they are and has no way of getting truly into the website. They are just viewing a seemingly random document found on the interweb. Yes, it says it is on garysgaragemahal, but that only shows in the URL, not on the page.

I'm afraid the same thing will be true of Google. In fact, the best case is that they just find it on the page and not as a separate file. If that's the case then I think there's a way to tell them to ignore the file itself. But the worst case is that they find just the file and not the page, which is what Freefind has done.

One question becomes if the problem of finding the page has to do with the fact that I have the file embedded on a tab, as I do in many if not most of the cases. Some of my reading suggests that Google won't find it. So, more testing is due.....

Ok, I'm officially bummed. In an effort to see if the issue is with tabs, aka "hidden content" in the Search Engine Optimization vernacular, I put the C6 document on my test page, not in a tab, and reran the Freefind indexing. And it does find bits and pieces from that document - but not on either the test page nor the C6 page, but the document itself in the Weebly directory.

And Google still hasn't found any of it, but that doesn't surprise me as I've seen that take upwards of two weeks, although three days is more normal.

So the jury is still out on this.

[Gary Lewis]

Ok, I'm officially bummed. In an effort to see if the issue is with tabs, aka "hidden content" in the Search Engine Optimization vernacular, I put the C6 document on my test page, not in a tab, and reran the Freefind indexing. And it does find bits and pieces from that document - but not on either the test page nor the C6 page, but the document itself in the Weebly directory.

And Google still hasn't found any of it, but that doesn't surprise me as I've seen that take upwards of two weeks, although three days is more normal.

So the jury is still out on this.

And now Google is finding " CHOKE COVER CLAMP SCREW (3)", which is in the Walker document on the Carter 1bbl page, in the file itself at http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/CarterYFandYFA.pdf and not on the Carter 1bbl page.

Perhaps it'll find it on the page later?

[ckuske]

And now Google is finding " CHOKE COVER CLAMP SCREW (3)", which is in the Walker document on the Carter 1bbl page, in the file itself at http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/CarterYFandYFA.pdf and not on the Carter 1bbl page.

Perhaps it'll find it on the page later?

Hi Gary,

I'm back and looking into it. So far though, I'm not sure we are do what you are looking for (Have PDF be indexed, but have search engines only offer the page the PDF is embedded in)

What we COULD do however (with WordPress, probably not Weebly) is setup a HTTP redirect rule so that only signed in members could view the PDFs. But of course, that's still not great as now Google can't index the PDFs! We are basically in a catch-22.

[Gary Lewis]

Hi Gary,

I'm back and looking into it. So far though, I'm not sure we are do what you are looking for (Have PDF be indexed, but have search engines only offer the page the PDF is embedded in)

What we COULD do however (with WordPress, probably not Weebly) is setup a HTTP redirect rule so that only signed in members could view the PDFs. But of course, that's still not great as now Google can't index the PDFs! We are basically in a catch-22.

Chris - Welcome back.

I've done a LOT of reading, and I cannot find anyone who is having this problem. And since Wordpress is said to have 32% of the web hosting market, someone would be reporting on it if it truly was a problem.

My hope is that the media management part of Wordpress, and specifically the Yoast SEO plugin that is said to be a must, shields the file itself from the search engines but shows the page on which it is shown. Saying it another way, when building a page you can upload a file, like a pdf, to be shown on that page. Surely the system is smart enough to know you don't want that file to be found twice as you'll take a hit in rankings with duplication. So there must be a way for the instance on the page to be found and yet the place where it is stored not to be.

I think we press on with the plan to migrate to Wordpress and hope for the best. At the very least it will be better than today since the files will be on the same host site. But hopefully it'll be what we need where the search engines find it on the page where we placed it to be viewed and not in the media directory.

And, speaking of that I contacted cms2cms, who do migrations. They said it'll be $300 for them to do a full migration. That seems like a good way to go to me as there's no way I want to be fixing each of the 549 pages we have when the automated tool glitches. But I'll check with other outfits to find their costs and compare them.

Plus I'll continue to scope out hosting sites to see what they provide and at what cost. Do you have a recommendation?

I want to get all the bits and pieces figured out and then pull the trigger.

[Gary Lewis]

Chris - Welcome back.

I've done a LOT of reading, and I cannot find anyone who is having this problem. And since Wordpress is said to have 32% of the web hosting market, someone would be reporting on it if it truly was a problem.

My hope is that the media management part of Wordpress, and specifically the Yoast SEO plugin that is said to be a must, shields the file itself from the search engines but shows the page on which it is shown. Saying it another way, when building a page you can upload a file, like a pdf, to be shown on that page. Surely the system is smart enough to know you don't want that file to be found twice as you'll take a hit in rankings with duplication. So there must be a way for the instance on the page to be found and yet the place where it is stored not to be.

I think we press on with the plan to migrate to Wordpress and hope for the best. At the very least it will be better than today since the files will be on the same host site. But hopefully it'll be what we need where the search engines find it on the page where we placed it to be viewed and not in the media directory.

And, speaking of that I contacted cms2cms, who do migrations. They said it'll be $300 for them to do a full migration. That seems like a good way to go to me as there's no way I want to be fixing each of the 549 pages we have when the automated tool glitches. But I'll check with other outfits to find their costs and compare them.

Plus I'll continue to scope out hosting sites to see what they provide and at what cost. Do you have a recommendation?

I want to get all the bits and pieces figured out and then pull the trigger.

More on Wordpress: I picked up the book WordPress All-In-One (for dummies) today. And since it cost $40 we are now committed.

Seriously though, what little I've read really looks good. Here are some things I've learned:

• Roles: There are several roles that are available which we might want to use, like Author, Editor, and Administrator. That means that we may be able to give people a page or a section for which to be responsible.

• Comments: It is possible to turn on the ability for people to comment on pages. And while those comments aren't visible to everyone unless or until an administrator approves them, at least we can get feedback on the pages.

• Navigation: There are many, many plug-ins that provide lots of options in how to create navigation menus. So I'm hoping we can make the nav menu even more useful.

• Breadcrumbs: These are the links at the top and/or bottom of the page that show how you got where you are. The themes I've found on Weebly don't provide breadcrumbs, but we need them. In addition, I think there are some things we can do to provide menus for sections of the site, like maybe Electrical or Driveline, to make it easier to find your way around the section.

So I'm going to be reading up on Wordpress, checking out hosting sites, and planning on how and when and to where we will migrate.

[ckuske]

More on Wordpress: I picked up the book WordPress All-In-One (for dummies) today. And since it cost $40 we are now committed.

Seriously though, what little I've read really looks good. Here are some things I've learned:

• Roles: There are several roles that are available which we might want to use, like Author, Editor, and Administrator. That means that we may be able to give people a page or a section for which to be responsible.

• Comments: It is possible to turn on the ability for people to comment on pages. And while those comments aren't visible to everyone unless or until an administrator approves them, at least we can get feedback on the pages.

• Navigation: There are many, many plug-ins that provide lots of options in how to create navigation menus. So I'm hoping we can make the nav menu even more useful.

• Breadcrumbs: These are the links at the top and/or bottom of the page that show how you got where you are. The themes I've found on Weebly don't provide breadcrumbs, but we need them. In addition, I think there are some things we can do to provide menus for sections of the site, like maybe Electrical or Driveline, to make it easier to find your way around the section.

So I'm going to be reading up on Wordpress, checking out hosting sites, and planning on how and when and to where we will migrate.

Hi Gary -

Thanks! Wordpress is pretty much the gold standard. It helps that there's a big plugin/theme ecosystem, you can customize it as much as you can handle, and it's widely supported.

Now I've never hosted a site that gets accessed more than a few times a month (for family stuff, email, etc) but I use Dreamhost. It's reasonably priced, and if you delegate the domain to them (they become the Authoritative DNS for your domain - and it's not as scary as it sounds), they have a "One Click" Wordpress install that picks sane defaults for configuration options. They also have the ability to scale up your site to a dedicated machine easily if that's ever needed.

As I mentioned before, you are welcome to try the site under my account for a bit. We could even use the real domain then probably have it transferred from one account to another (I'd have to double check with their support folks though to make sure its possible)

Or, I'd be happy to get a test domain. $10 for a domain is well worth all the help I've gotten from you guys already.

[ckuske]

Hi Gary -

Thanks! Wordpress is pretty much the gold standard. It helps that there's a big plugin/theme ecosystem, you can customize it as much as you can handle, and it's widely supported.

Now I've never hosted a site that gets accessed more than a few times a month (for family stuff, email, etc) but I use Dreamhost. It's reasonably priced, and if you delegate the domain to them (they become the Authoritative DNS for your domain - and it's not as scary as it sounds), they have a "One Click" Wordpress install that picks sane defaults for configuration options. They also have the ability to scale up your site to a dedicated machine easily if that's ever needed.

As I mentioned before, you are welcome to try the site under my account for a bit. We could even use the real domain then probably have it transferred from one account to another (I'd have to double check with their support folks though to make sure its possible)

Or, I'd be happy to get a test domain. $10 for a domain is well worth all the help I've gotten from you guys already.

Take a look here:

https://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress/managed-wp-hosting/

 

[ctubutis]

So there must be a way for the instance on the page to be found and yet the place where it is stored not to be.

Gary, I don't think this can be done. Search engines are stupid, all they know is the IP address and the pathname to get to anything they index. They have no knowledge that one page may embed another into it; they are two separate pages to the search engine and it treats them independently.

As you've found, once something is hosted on another site ("in the cloud" e.g. onedrive) the crawlers won't crawl those external sites. A search engine knows nothing about embedding a page, it knows nothing about how things get presented (rendered) to the user.

The document root of a web server hosts all of your documents (pages). The topmost level of a site, e.g. /index.html lives at the root whereas /subdir/index.html lives in /subdir which is one off from the root but is still in the doc root. Clear as mud, I'm sure, but....

I was a WordPress admin at the Denver Post for ~3 years but that was a few years ago, I've forgotten a lot of the details by now. Yes, plugins can allow you to do a lot, but some plugins & themes can have security vulnerabilities which can allow malicious actors to scribble on your site. Which means there's the chance you'll get up one morning to find your site hosting ads to Canadian pharmacies (ask me how I know).

I'm glad you bought a book, it should help you. :)

~~

I didn't see this thread until just recently but it looks like you're getting some good help from the other Chris. ;)

[Gary Lewis]

So there must be a way for the instance on the page to be found and yet the place where it is stored not to be.

Gary, I don't think this can be done. Search engines are stupid, all they know is the IP address and the pathname to get to anything they index. They have no knowledge that one page may embed another into it; they are two separate pages to the search engine and it treats them independently.

As you've found, once something is hosted on another site ("in the cloud" e.g. onedrive) the crawlers won't crawl those external sites. A search engine knows nothing about embedding a page, it knows nothing about how things get presented (rendered) to the user.

The document root of a web server hosts all of your documents (pages). The topmost level of a site, e.g. /index.html lives at the root whereas /subdir/index.html lives in /subdir which is one off from the root but is still in the doc root. Clear as mud, I'm sure, but....

I was a WordPress admin at the Denver Post for ~3 years but that was a few years ago, I've forgotten a lot of the details by now. Yes, plugins can allow you to do a lot, but some plugins & themes can have security vulnerabilities which can allow malicious actors to scribble on your site. Which means there's the chance you'll get up one morning to find your site hosting ads to Canadian pharmacies (ask me how I know).

I'm glad you bought a book, it should help you. :)

~~

I didn't see this thread until just recently but it looks like you're getting some good help from the other Chris. ;)

Well, isn't it interesting that the "Chris's" are the ones with webhosting and Wordpress knowledge.

ckuske - Thanks for the link to Dreamhost. The bottom tier at $16.95/mo provides ~100K monthly visitors, and if they are measuring the way others measure, meaning daily, then we are at 12.3K/month. So that would work nicely.

They also say they do "Free Professional Site Migration". I'm guessing that is from a different Wordpress site to theirs, but I'll contact them to see if they do it from Weebly. And even if there's a fee it might be worth it to have someone move it to their system.

And thanks for the offer on trying the site. But I'm not sure how to go about doing that. We have to convert it from Weebly to Wordpress, which means pointing the conversion code or people at the 1.7Gb, and growing, backup. Then we'd have another big file to upload. Let me noodle on this for a bit longer and think through how we could do it, who we'd have to pay and how much, etc. I just want to have all our ducks in a row. But thanks again!

ctubutis - I see what you are saying about bots finding pdf's, but somehow it seems to be done on other sites. I think. But I'll have to do some research to prove what I think I've found, which is pdf's can be found on a page that shows you that you are in someone's website and provides a nav menu to go elsewhere on the site.

Now we have the bots finding the pdf's that are truly hosted on Weebly. (At least they've found one of them and I assume all three.) But they've only found them, or are only showing them, in the storage place rather than on the page. And when you click on the link that a Google search provides you get the document and nothing but the document. So, in the case of the file on the Carter YF And YFA (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/CarterYFandYFA.pdf) you are just "there". In the document itself with no way of getting anywhere else.

But if you go to the page at Documentation/Fuel Systems/Carburetors, Chokes, & EFI/Carter 1BBl (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/carter-yfa-1bbl.html) and go to the Instructions tab and then the Walker tab you'll see the exact same document but you know where you are and can navigate elsewhere.

And yet, last I looked, Google hasn't found the specific string I'm looking for on the page but it has in the document in the "files" section.

 

[ctubutis]

Well, isn't it interesting that the "Chris's" are the ones with webhosting and Wordpress knowledge.

ckuske - Thanks for the link to Dreamhost. The bottom tier at $16.95/mo provides ~100K monthly visitors, and if they are measuring the way others measure, meaning daily, then we are at 12.3K/month. So that would work nicely.

They also say they do "Free Professional Site Migration". I'm guessing that is from a different Wordpress site to theirs, but I'll contact them to see if they do it from Weebly. And even if there's a fee it might be worth it to have someone move it to their system.

And thanks for the offer on trying the site. But I'm not sure how to go about doing that. We have to convert it from Weebly to Wordpress, which means pointing the conversion code or people at the 1.7Gb, and growing, backup. Then we'd have another big file to upload. Let me noodle on this for a bit longer and think through how we could do it, who we'd have to pay and how much, etc. I just want to have all our ducks in a row. But thanks again!

ctubutis - I see what you are saying about bots finding pdf's, but somehow it seems to be done on other sites. I think. But I'll have to do some research to prove what I think I've found, which is pdf's can be found on a page that shows you that you are in someone's website and provides a nav menu to go elsewhere on the site.

Now we have the bots finding the pdf's that are truly hosted on Weebly. (At least they've found one of them and I assume all three.) But they've only found them, or are only showing them, in the storage place rather than on the page. And when you click on the link that a Google search provides you get the document and nothing but the document. So, in the case of the file on the Carter YF And YFA (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/files/theme/CarterYFandYFA.pdf) you are just "there". In the document itself with no way of getting anywhere else.

But if you go to the page at Documentation/Fuel Systems/Carburetors, Chokes, & EFI/Carter 1BBl (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/carter-yfa-1bbl.html) and go to the Instructions tab and then the Walker tab you'll see the exact same document but you know where you are and can navigate elsewhere.

And yet, last I looked, Google hasn't found the specific string I'm looking for on the page but it has in the document in the "files" section.

The problem is, Gary, that search engines don't know how to *render* pages - tabs, embeds, stuff like that. It is unaffected by cookies. The only thing it does is scan the source code, the only thing it knows is what site it's on. It has no clue how the final page is supposed to be presented to the users, it just reads the source code. It will index links to itself (domain) but not to places off-site.

I'm watching the Today show on NBC, Al Roker was talking about the temps in the mid-90s in the east, I feel like it sure came close to snow temperature last night.