Thank you Google, you twat

So, if you’d not noticed already, I converted my blog to WordPress yesterday. I know, I know, I told WordPress to suck my balls. Apparently things change, not least because of a half-dead install of Habari thanks to me installing an unstable night-release (don’t ask why, I don’t know).

It was actually quicker to migrate Habari back to WordPress than it was trying to wrangle my back-up onto the server, replacing the changed files etc and as time is a precious commodity these days that’s what I did.

Unfortunately, in my haste to get a working blog running, I forgot to block off the test install at /wordpress/. Google, while both magnificent and impressive in its speed, has pissed me right off by indexing shitloads of content under /wordpress/ … I don’t even begin to understand how it FOUND it, given that it wasn’t linked from anywhere.

Anyway, point being my SERPs and feed will be all over the shop for a while until things settled down. I can only apologise.

(Note: this is not the end of my love affair with Habari … but more coming on that soon ;) )

14 comments so far

  1. Rhys said:
    On 16 Feb at 2:13 pm

    Did you block search engines from your fresh install? Caught me out a couple of times myself.

  2. Jem said:
    On 16 Feb at 2:21 pm

    I did, but not before Google had already crawled a load of pages. It was ridiculously quick .. I’m talking minutes!

  3. Goosh said:
    On 16 Feb at 2:23 pm

    Jem,

    I had that problem with a /dev/ copy of a site recently. Simple things like Google Analytics installed prior to launch will be enough to trigger an index request.

    I recommend Simple 301 Redirects for WordPress (http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-wordpress/) to help you sync stuff up quickly if you haven’t already implemented a soft 301 in your .htacces. Follow that up with a Google Webmaster account and clear up the slops that drip back through.

    Bonza! Pain in the arse, but will sort itself out in a few days.

  4. Jem said:
    On 16 Feb at 2:25 pm

    I already have the following in my htaccess:

    # thank you google, you piece of shit
RedirectMatch 301 /wordpress/(.*) https://www.jemjabella.co.uk/$1

    ;)

  5. Goosh said:
    On 16 Feb at 2:26 pm

    Perfect ;)

  6. neal said:
    On 16 Feb at 3:38 pm

    you might want to use the url removal tool to remove the directory from google’s results – as i found out after i had a site hacked by spammers (i caught it and deleted the content within a day).

    i had 12,500 articles posted and they still keep showing up in site:example.com searches because google must be picking up traces from within its own database. now moving all the real content to another directory and deleting the current /content/ dir from google.

    google doesn’t realise it has gone because drupal returns 200 even for page not found, instead of a proper 404. be wary in case wordpress does the same!

  7. Jem said:
    On 16 Feb at 3:40 pm

    Cheers Neal, will do

    Have got my 404 with a proper 404 header though, which should hopefully help too. :)

  8. Stephanie said:
    On 16 Feb at 8:18 pm

    Wait… the Jem that refused to use WordPress and once coded her own CMS gave in? WHAT!?! What is the world coming to?

  9. Jem said:
    On 16 Feb at 8:27 pm

    I know. Blame Isabel :P

  10. Cara said:
    On 17 Feb at 12:43 am

    Hey! You have an amazing site! I love your scripts!

    OUch, I’m sorry to hear about that. Thankfully I’ve never encountered that problem *flew!* Best of luck!!!

  11. Rhys said:
    On 17 Feb at 3:34 am

    At work we were having issues with Google indexing our test sites – so until we figured it out and starting adding ‘no-index’ meta tags, we had to set up a heap of 301 redirects for each of those sites.

    One time customers started ordering things through a test site well before it was even finished! The developers were totally confused about the new “test” data.

  12. Aimée said:
    On 17 Feb at 8:45 am

    Stop teasing us with Habari hints! I’m dying to know of this secret project.

  13. Rebecca said:
    On 22 Feb at 4:52 pm

    As far as I know/can tell, Google implements a bunch of fancy heuristics/rules for common website directories. For example, /wordpress/ is pretty damn common so it will make a bee-line for that. Perhaps naming a wordpress install subdirectory to /monkeypants/ instead will give Mother Google a challenge! :)

  14. Vera said:
    On 28 Feb at 7:18 pm

    Hm… interesting. Every time I finally start thinking that maybe (just maybe WP might be a bit bloated for me, and look Jem’s converted a loooong time ago)… you go back to WP.

    Hm: what gives? :o

    Also I’m eagerly interested in the Habari affair continuation. :D