10 Replies to Getting Started with Website Tonight

1. Gary says:

   May 25, 2012 at 10:08 am

   Daniel and Kirkland…thanks for these redirect solutions for Website Tonight. I was in a panic mode for sure. I can’t thank you enough, you’ve removed the barriers for current and future website redesigns for me using WT. -Best

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2. Daniel says:

   April 28, 2012 at 5:32 am

   Like Kirkland said, be careful about redirecting within your own site in terms of SEO. Google will drop your Pagerank severely for doing so. Thanks for the advice, Kirkland.

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3. Daniel says:

   April 27, 2012 at 4:51 am

   I’ve had to deal with this issue as well. It’s a serious shortcoming for Website Tonight and one they should put all their effort into resolving. That being said, another approach, for Google anyhow, is to “demote” a page in Google Webmaster tools.
   Let me quote: “Sitelinks are automatically generated links that may appear under your site’s search results. If you don’t want a page to appear as a sitelink, you can demote it. Only site owners and users with full permissions can demote sitelinks.”
   Fairly simple.
   Webmaster Tools> site configuration> sitelinks> demote this sitelink URL….
   and then just enter the full URL of the page that is either showing up as a crawl error or that your want Google to ignore as a sitelink.
   The downside of this is that if the page in question has some ranking juice you want transferred to a newer page by virtue of a 301 redirect you lose out on that juice. The upside is if you happened to change your home page from a .html to a .php it can move you in the right direction.

   -Cheers.

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4. Victor C says:

   April 13, 2012 at 1:18 pm

   And your Robot.txts?

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5. Victor C says:

   April 13, 2012 at 1:17 pm

   Hey Kirkland…. Thanks sooo much for this info!!! I foolishly renamed a few pages (including my homepage) because I wanted better SEO friendly URLs. Then I realized I was dealing with mass duplicate content issues and my serps began tanking. I was devastated when I found out WST didn’t allow 301s. I have scoured one end of the internet and back again looking for a solution! This is a God-send! So after you re-create the URL to the blank page, what do you do, just exclude it from your site map?

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   • Kirkland says:

     April 17, 2012 at 10:54 pm

     Yes, I would exclude it from the sitemap. A sitemap is only a suggestion to Google. If they find pages for your domain that are not in your sitemap they can still choose to index them, and they can choose not to index files you do include in your sitemap. The sitemap is supposed to be your way of making Google’s job easier. By removing a redirect from the sitemap you are no longer suggesting Google index the redirect, which they don’t want to do anyway. They will probably still crawl the file to see whats there, and when they do they will see that its a redirect and find the new page, which should be added to your sitemap anyway.

     Glad I could help,
     Kirkland

     Reply
6. Gary says:

   January 20, 2012 at 5:57 pm

   How can I set-up 301 redirects in Website Tonight. I have activated the Google Webmaster Tools within Website Tonight, but not sure how it’s done. I changed a page URL in WT and uploaded it. Now when I click on the page in the Google organic listing, it gives me the 404 Redirect Error…page not found. Thanks in advance for your help.

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   • Kirkland says:

     February 7, 2012 at 10:46 pm

     Hi Gary,

     Great question. The bad news… it’s not possible. Website Tonight does not have a way to do 301 redirects at this time. However, to help with your issue you can use a meta refresh. First, recreate the page that you deleted. You don’t need to add the content, just add a page and change the file name to match what Google is listing. Then add a meta refresh tag. In the name field put refresh and in the content field put…

     0;url=http://www.yourdomain.com/the_new_file_name.html

     Obviously you will need to update the URL. Once you have done that republish. No this is not ideal and lame from an SEO standpoint, but at least this will stop you from loosing all the traffic that is going to the old page. Google will eventually transfer all of your page rank to the new page and drop this one. How long will that take? It’s up to Google, but I’ve seen them stay up for months.

     Thanks,
     Kirkland

     Reply
7. Dan says:

   August 20, 2011 at 6:42 pm

   Do you have a monthly charge to help me with the site?

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   • Kirkland says:

     October 7, 2011 at 12:22 pm

     At this time I do not offer any sort of monthly maintenance service. Sorry.

     Reply