Word Press Help please

[HR Solutions]

Can someone please help me with a Word press site. We have just had a site done by a guy on wordpress. Apart from a few problems we are having, one of the problems I have is if you type our name or telephone number under a google search, it cannot find our wordpress site ? The second problem I am having is if you type our website www.2hrs.co.za in a facebook posting (where you normally post) it comes up "Under Construction" . Does anyone know what the problem is please ?

[IanF]

Hi
Google search works here.

Try a different browser.

[HR Solutions]

@ ian - Ok I see that but if you click on it it comes up as : http://2hrs.co.za/ not www.2hrs.co.za. why is this and is it a problem ?
And as I said if you type in the actual company name HR Solutions it does not come up in google !
Does this perhaps have something to do with the different URL's above - Is it not something on Wordpress that the guy has loaded something wrong ?

[Chrisjan B]

In the Wordpress backend check GeneraL Settings - WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL)

Read: http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL
At your own risk....

[HR Solutions]

chrismine thank you for that advice. I have just checked it and it seems to be the http one, not the www one, but I cant seem to change it. It gives me an error message !

[Dave A]

Wordpress is going to need write permissions on your .htaccess file in the public root directory.

Using whatever file manager you have available, change the permissions on the .htaccess file, make the change in Wordpress, then change the permissions on your .htaccess file to read only again.

The other way of doing it is insert this into your .htaccess file:

[IanF]

@ ian - Ok I see that but if you click on it it comes up as : http://2hrs.co.za/ not www.2hrs.co.za. why is this and is it a problem ?
And as I said if you type in the actual company name HR Solutions it does not come up in google !
Does this perhaps have something to do with the different URL's above - Is it not something on Wordpress that the guy has loaded something wrong ?

You should be able to get to your website from either www or without that is how our websites are setup. Your hosting company will set that up. I don't see that as a problem.
For getting your company name to come up on google the cheap way is with google adwords. Just never let them bid for you always put on a limit.
SEO from my side is a wing and pray with lots of words. Search for Kwikfolders a made up name for one of my products. But this has been out there for years.

[Dave A]

You should be able to get to your website from either www or without that is how our websites are setup.

Good onsite SEO should force the URL to resolve to one or the other.

[Mark Atkinson]

Hrmm.

If you remind me about this via PM tomorrow I'll take a look for you.

It's not necessary to do a redirect via .htaccess as this can be modified directly from the admin panel. Sounds like you may also have a few indexation settings.

I'll run our crawler through your site to see if I can pick up anything specific when I'm back on a PC.

[Dave A]

OK - let's give this a proper whirl.

I suspect your problem is the URL you are trying to post on Facebook has already been crawled and cached by Facebook (obviously before the site was actually properly up and running).

This is the Facebook URL debug tool. It doesn't use the Facebook cache and tests live. Slap a URL in there and you get a whole lot of useful feedback.
(And when I put your site's URL in there, it brought back a whole pile of painful memories about og tags )

The bad news is your install is not optimised for Facebook - it's missing a few og tags. The good news is it is good enough to produce a reasonable result from posting a link on Facebook - if there's a way to overcome the cache problem. (Follow the link, put in your URL and see for yourself).

You're not alone - I checked TFSA too and I see that somewhere in one of the upgrades I lost all the hard work I'd put into optimising TFSA for Facebook myself.

I got fairly involved in the development of vBulletin at one point, and did a lot of alpha and beta testing of its native Facebook optimisation. Unfortunately the discussions I'd love to link to are in member only content on vBulletin.com and so long ago I expect I'd have serious trouble finding it. So here goes from memory...

The Facebook URL crawler is a fairly tricky beast to please.

The first problem is it times out in no time flat (and who can blame it given the volume of work it's put to). This presents a real challenge for websites hosted in SA where you're losing about 250ms of response time window just by virtue of the crawl coming from offshore. You're server simply has to be on its game and ready to fire. Link to a slow responding server and you're dead.

Next, the crawler searches for a rel=canonical tag in the page head section (which your site has ), and then crawls that page if it is different to the link originally inputted.
If this is successful, this is the link that will be returned and used in your post on Facebook.
Now it looks for og tags. This is information in your page head section specifically intended for Facebook use, and gives a lot of control over how your page is previewed in a Facebook post.
If that isn't found, it'll use the description meta and the first image it can find as the preview content.
Sometimes it'll give you a few options of images to select.
It likes jpg images and won't use png images.

I might get around to tackling the www.domain vs http://domain issue another time (if someone doesn't beat me to it). But for now, if you don't know exactly what you're doing or why, I wouldn't change anything. It's working just fine if you want http://domain URLs. If you want www.domain URLs, it's going to take a little work to change.

For now I'm removing the code I posted in post 6 above. If there's a conflict between the content in the .htaccess file and the wp-config.php file, things could get quite ugly.

[tec0]

Vision of company:

To deliver quality service through efficient & professional recruitment, thereby assisting our clients in the growth of their businesses. Our immediate vision for the company is ensuring our Cape Town branch is up and running supplying candidates to our valued Cape Town clients.

Source

mmm

seems to work just fine...

[HR Solutions]

Thank you Dave. Your input is greatly appreciated.
@ tec You are not understanding what I originally asked. But thanks anyway.

[HR Solutions]

I would like to just say a BIG thank you to Mark Atkinson. He asked me to send a reminder to him this morning, for him to have a look at our site. After doing this and communicating with him, he has made quite a few changes to our site and rectified the problem that I originally mentioned and given a few recommendations. People like him that go out of their way to help goes a long way. I will certainly recommend him, and use him in the future.

Thank you Mark

[DeonT]

@HR Solutions, do you have contact details for Mark or his business?

[HR Solutions]

Deon, I have been dealing with him via PM. Send him a message and I am sure he will give you his details.