Today
I found out by doing a google search that my site has several old
listing for links from the program that I had installed before.
Let me back up a second... I was running B2 evolution and someone
started using it to send out tons of junk mail so the company hosting
my site sent me a little email and said they didn't want my
business anymore and I had 2 weeks to move all my web pages off their
server.
When I changed hosting companys I didn't install the same software
again and I had a lot of pages indexed with google, over 3000 pages.
In less than a week I was down to about 7 pages indexed with google.
I was a little surprised how fast you get removed once your pages go dead.
Well today I was looking through google and I found a couple of the
pages that have not been deleted yet and I have no idea why, but I
start thinking I need to save them.
I convince myself that I will be missing out of all the traffic these page would have received if I let them get deleted also.
So I start to put up matching pages and I run into my first little problem. The pages don't have .html extensions on them.
In fact they don't have extensions at all.
So I spend about 4 hours trying to learn to program PHP then I give up.
I am just about to decided it is hopeless when I find out that Apache
has a modification you you can make to do a server side rewrite.
This solves almost half of my problems.
The first google link I am trying to save is
www.rad5.com/statistics
I found the file .htaccess
next I change the first 2 lines in the file to read:
rewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^statistics$ numbers.html
This changes the file name statistics to numbers.html
Now when I go to
google and click on the link for my statistics page the server will automatically jump you to my numbers.html page.
This works for about half the pages the other half have a question mark
in the name somewhere, and I gave up trying to figure out how to put a
"?" in the first file name.
I tried again to get a PHP file to read the "?" in some of the file
names but after several hours I again gave up on this project and
decided I would just be happy with the ones I saved.
Now all 4 or 5 people who click on these links in the next year will not get an error.
Probably not worth spending the whole day working on this little project but that's what I did.
June 1, 2005