Web Client FAQs

Q: I see my new site when I'm at home, but when I'm at the office I still see the old site. What's up?
A: There are two possibilities:
1. DNS has not yet propagated to the DNS server that computers in your office consult to resolve urls and time will fix the problem.
2. Your office uses it's own setting to resolve the url of your website, and it's overriding the one the rest of the world sees. If this is the case, you'll need to have your network administrator update this local record.

Q: Now that my site has launched, many popular urls returned by search engines return "page not found" errors. What's going on?
A: Search engines like Google store specific urls for your site. Even if the same content resource exists on both your old and new site, it is very likely the the urls for this resource will differ. For example, compare the urls for the online store:
old website => http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/index.php?p=Online_Store&s=4
vs.
new website => http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/store

Unless your old site and your new site happen to use the same urls for the same pages, the document will not be found on the new site. It will take some time for the search engines to reindex your site with the new urls. In the long term, Plone's url structure will be better for search engine rankings, because the url it uses for the same document is more sensible and related to the content itself.

One action you can take to reduce the number of "page not found" errors while waiting for the search engines to catch up is to configure redirects from popular "old" urls to their new equivalents. This means that when someone asks to visit 'index.php?p=Online_Store&s=4' on your site, their browser is politely told "the page you're looking now lives somewhere else" and they're automatically sent to the right place. Since redirects must be set up one at a time, it's usually not worth the time and expense of setting up an exhaustive redirection system for every url on your old site. Instead, it's a better use of time to target the most frequently visited urls. These can be determined by analyzing web statistics for the old site, or lacking this information, common sense.

It's also possible to request a recrawl, from Google, though it's dubious whether this will cause things to happen any faster than usual: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl