What I did to save Extreme Trix from SEO problems?

Posted on December 23, 2009, 6:10 PM, by Ankit.

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You may remember that Extreme Trix was deleted on 16th of November and it took me almost complete two days to make it live again without any problem, it was entirely my fault for not keeping a backup, but from now onwards I have started using WP-DB-Backup plug-in which helps me in getting daily backup easily. When Extreme Trix was deleted the biggest challenge to me was to solve SEO problems. Actually I had two installations of WordPress in my Database one was of WordPress 2.7.1 and second one was of WordPress 2.8.1. I wanted to remove WordPress 2.7.1 as ET was powered by 2.8.1 and the blog which was powered by 2.7.1 was just a test blog which was consuming my free space and making ET very slow.

While deleting that first installation of WordPress by mistake second one (blog directory) also got deleted where Extreme Trix was installed. I lost my everything images, videos, docs and even some articles too. Thanks to Farhan and Prateek bro who helped me in finding back images and permalinks of the posts and pages from Google Cache. At last after continuous hard work of five hours my images and permalinks were restored.

The second challenge for me was to redirect some pages and my forum (my forum was also deleted so I installed a new one) be directory to the new one. I searched on Google about how to redirect PHP based pages and finally got a solution. First my login page was www.extremetrix.com/wp-login.php but now its www.extremetrix.com/blog/wp-login.php. To redirect old page to new one I simply made a new PHP file and added this piece of code -

< ?php header( 'Location: http://extremetrix.com/blog/wp-login.php' ) ; ?>

then saved it with name wp-login.php in my root directory.

Firstly when I launched Extreme Trix’s forum, it was with permalink forum, but when I re-installed it I changed the permalink to “support” instead of forum. To redirect forum to support what I did is just made a blank directory with name “forum” and made an index.htm file. In that index file I added a piece of HTML code (301 redirection code) which redirects and tells the crawler not to index forum directory. The code was -

<html>
<head>
<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
window.location.replace("http://www.extremetrix.com/support");
-->
</script>
<noscript>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10; URL=http://www.extremetrix.com/support"/>
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="10"/>
<meta name="Description" content="301 moved permanently"/>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"/>
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"/>
</noscript>
<title>301 moved permanently</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<h1>ET - Forum</h1>
<p>has been moved to new address</p>
<a href=" http://www.extremetrix.com/support/"> <h1>ET - Support</h1></a>
<p>Sorry for inconvenience... </p>
</center>
</body>
</html>

Last challenge for me was to find a free SEO optimized theme for New version of Extreme Trix, I didn’t want again use my old theme because everything was new on my blog and moreover it was a bit un-professional. After reading reviews of 5-6 free themes the best theme I found was Swift by Satish bro. That time I was expecting a spike in my traffic so I switched to it as it was light and had very cool features.

Well that’s all! It was the entire story how I made Extreme Trix up again and solved SEO errors. If you also have such a drastic blogging story do share with us.

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