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clamor

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Everything posted by clamor

  1. Hi Sorry, I missed the bit about the bug. Sounds like I have to upgrade to 5.2.16 after all. Thanks for the advice. Best regards
  2. I am not sure what you mean. The tag is generating automatically and I am not skilled in coding.
  3. Hi Since late 2014 the number of URLs indexed from my site by Google has dropped from over 300 to 32. This seems to have coincided with upgrading to version 5.2.14. I posted a question on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum about this today - see the response below: On all of your individual product pages you have this tag which tells Google that these two pages are essentially the same and you want the OTHER one indexed <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.recycledpatterns.com/shoppingcart/index.php?_a=product"/> Can anyone explain why this tag is appearing on the product pages and what I need to do? I know I can upgrade to newer versions of CubeCart but I don't want to move to beta versions at this stage and prefer to keep my licence key for now. Thanks for any assistance or advice you can provide.
  4. Hi Sorry my post wasn't more clear. The page with the excessive code is my fault and not a CC issue. I set up a separate landing page with a CSS menu bar and that is the cause of the problem. I also included social media buttons and this made the problem worse. I have moved the social media script further down the page and I will try to set up a simpler navigation menu. I may abandon the landing page and set up a redirect straight to the cart. I think it is better for customers to see products immediately rather than going through a landing page first. I am working on the SSL certificate first and this is another challenge as I have to change my IP address. The store will probably be offline again for a day or so. For information, the violation warning is below and it seems to be sensible advice: Search engines will largely ignore CSS code but large quantities of CSS code that precede the actual text will force the text content further down in the HTML. Since search engines may analyse only the first 100 KB of a page, it is possible that the CSS block may prevent search engines from indexing any page content.
  5. Thanks, I'll have a look at the skin template files.
  6. Hi This topic has been discussed in the past but I do not understand the responses. I have noticed that H1 tags are missing in categories, sub-categories and documents other than the home page. H1 tags are essential for ranking by Bing and Yahoo. Has anyone found an efficient way to include these at a global level? As a quick fix, I have included H1 tags in the descriptions but this looks very messy and repetitive. All the best
  7. Continuing on with my SEO audit, I am wondering if it would be worthwhile to put 'Powered by CubeCart' with a link to the CubeCart website in my footer area (alongside the copyright text). Is this within the rules? I have the paid version but I noticed the traffic dropped off when I stopped using the free version. Genuine backlinks are important to ranking so this seems to be an approach to consider. Obviously, with the free version, the title text characters are limited by the CubeCart text so the paid version is much better. Alternatively, should I consider becoming a CubeCart affiliate? All the best
  8. Hi I'm back! The website and store is now back online - it has actually been online for a few days. The 301 redirect is now working and the sitemap is also generating perfectly as www. I don't understand this but Havenswift-hosting was correct. For the benefit of other members, the redirect needs to be done at the cPanel level and not at the server level. I am not game to redirect the index.php file yet but I have entered a redirect into the index.html file head area. I have resolved most of the SEO violations and I am down to three. One relates to excessive css code on the landing page so I moved the code to a css single file but I it has not resolved the violation. The other relates to the sitemap being too long but I will have to live with this.
  9. Hi Again I am still a bit perplexed about the trailing forward slash issue so I checked the main.php file to find the following: <title>{$META_TITLE}</title> <link rel="canonical" href="{$CANONICAL}" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="{$STORE_URL}/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/skins/{$SKIN_FOLDER}/styles/common.css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/skins/{$SKIN_FOLDER}/styles/{$SKIN_SUBSET}/layout.css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/js/styles/styles.php" media="screen" /> Could the forward slash at the end of each entry be causing the problem? Also, I am happy to report that the store is back online. The problem was caused by default settings at the hosting end that point to both www and non-www. This caused a loop when the 301 redirect was set up. I will contact the hosting provider for advice on how to get around this.
  10. Hi No custom urls, incorrect rewrite commands or third party changes. I am using CubeCart out of the box so to speak. In general, I find I need to wait for the server at the hosting end to update for any changes to activate. My partner has reversed the 301 redirect and the site is still down. Anyway, thanks for all the advice. We will try to get the store back online today.
  11. Hi Yes my site is down due to a 301 redirect . I am not panicking yet as it is hosted in Germany and there is often a delay when making any major changes. I don't know where the trailing forward slashes are coming from but I have not made any modifications to the store - 692 SEO violations. The information above about the sitemaps and robots.txt is useful. I am hoping that the CubeCart sitemap with generate properly when the 301 redirect is in place. In regard to restrictions on the size of sitemaps by online providers, one of my SEO violation alerts was as follows: The page at " /sitemap.xml" contains 338 links. Too many links in the same page may affect the indexing process that is used by search engine crawlers. This may result in poor search rankings for the page or in the search engine ignoring the page. The size of the CubeCart generated sitemaps could be a problem if this is true. The sitemap referred to was generated by an online provider.
  12. Thanks, that is a great suggestion. I have a similar sitemap in the public html folder but I should probably replace or delete the automatically generated one in the store folder.
  13. Thanks. I have updated my signature and I will look into an SSL certificate and setting up SSL. I don't really understand many of the suggestions above. I can organise a 301 redirect but I am not sure how or why this should affect the way the sitemap generates. It also does not explain the forward slashes forcing unnecessary redirects. Activating SSL seems to be a separate issue. I may have to manually edit the sitemap.
  14. Hi Ian and ayz1 No, I am not using the SSL as that page looked too complicated and I thought PayPal would offer sufficient security. I probably need to rethink that approach. I do have the www for the standard store URL on the SSL page but I have not filled in any of the other boxes. I have a separate landing page for the domain. Most of the SEO violations relate to multiple canonical formats caused by the www vs non www issue and unnecessary redirects due to forward slashes appearing at the end of links. It is all a bit strange.
  15. Hi All I have been doing an SEO audit on my website and there are issues with the site being accessible via both www and non www URLs. I prefer www but the sitemap automatically generated within cubecart shows non-www URLs. Is there any way to change the sitemap generation settings? I am thinking of doing a 301 redirect to www but this won't work well if the sitemap references non www URLs. All the best
  16. Hi Everyone I am trying to upgrade from 5.2.8 to 5.2.10 but when I try to run setup I receive an error message saying that Ion Cube PHP Loader is not installed. I have Ion Cube PHP Loader version 4.5.3 installed on my server and PHP version 5.3.10 as the result of my upgrade attempt. There were problems with a blank screen when I upgraded to 5.2.8 but the CubeCart team provided assistance which resolved this. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
  17. Thank you so much for your excellent advice, as always. I will wait a few days for the outcome from PayPal and then activate the red cross - what a great option! I have had other orders from the US so I am sure most people from that country conduct transactions consistent with their values.
  18. Hi Everyone I need your advice again. I have been dealing with an issue from a disgruntled 'customer' today. My site is based in Australia but has a .com address but it is clear on the website that we are based in Australia. An item was ordered from the US on 25 April - an important national public holiday in Australia to honour war veterans, which was followed by a weekend this year. I processed this order on 25 April but posted it on 28 April, the first business day after the holiday, to avoid any damage to the item from damp / rain over the weekend as the item is a sewing pattern made from paper.The shipping policy makes it clear that shipping times will vary according to the location (which I thought would be clear to international customers) but obviously I need to update the policy and cart to include tracking options at an additional cost. Anyway, a hold was placed on the PayPal payment last night and this triggered a cancellation of order payment email via the cart to the 'customer' so the PayPal payment is on hold. So at this stage, I have outlaid the cost of the merchandise plus packaging and international postage payments with no payment from the 'customer'. Initially the PayPal payment was approved when the merchandise was posted. The 'customer' is very irate and went on an email rampage overnight while I was sleeping and has opened a dispute with PayPal. The claim is now under investigation even though I had no opportunity to respond to the 'customer's' emails. I am not sure what set the 'customer' off (possibly the cancellation email) as the item will more than likely arrive within a few days. Specifically, this person is accusing me of fraud, claiming that the item is still listed on my website (false and probably a caching issue on her own computer - and how would she know if I have additional stock listed after her purchase?) and accusing me of listing the item on my Etsy store (also false as I have only recently opened the Etsy store and the item has never been listed on that platform). Also, threatening me with opening a dispute on Etsy (???). Meanwhile I cannot organise a refund because she has frozen her payment on PayPal by opening a dispute. Seriously, life is too short to be dealing with this aggravation and discourteous communication over a $10.95 item, despite being out of pocket for the price of a significantly reduced brand new item, packaging, petrol to the post office, my time and international shipping, so my questions are: 1) How can I deactivate the automated cancellation of order email as I would prefer to communicate with customers directly to avoid unnecessary escalation of issues. 2) Is it possible to block certain customers from purchasing via the shopping cart or could you please consider this option in future upgrades? I am looking forward to your valued advice as I have not been enjoying the quality of my life today and I would prefer not to deal with people like this. My communication to the client is professional, as always, if delivered with gritted teeth!
  19. Hi All My shopping cart is now working again thanks to support from the CubeCart team. Many thanks!
  20. My website has crashed due to the issue outlined below. This happened 24 hours ago when I upgraded to 5.2.8 due to the admin console alerting me that I needed to do so. I submitted a support ticket and waited for a response on UK time (I am in Australia). The response when it finally arrived advised me to read this post and follow the instructions to recode my homepage!!! I am not a professional coder and this issue was clearly caused by the CubeCart upgrade. Upgrades should be fully tested before they are released. If support is not to be provided, what can I do now? Should I reinstall the previous back-up and ignore all future upgrades? I am feeling quite upset about this as I read the above warning too late.
  21. Hi Tried again and you were right about the positioning of the script. There was an additional problem caused by <script type="text/javascript"> before the script - I removed this, kept the literal tags and then it worked! Thank you so much again for your help.
  22. Hi I tried that. The page content did not drop down but the ad did not appear either. Cleared cache and checked on other computers but no luck. I also tried removing the literal tags but that just caused the content to drop down again and still no ad.
  23. Hi again I tried to edit the main.php file to include the Adsense code in the right sidebar as follows but it did not work. The content text simply dropped down lower in the page and the ad did not appear at all. Can anyone see what I am doing wrong? <div class="sidebar" id="sidebar_right"> {if isset($POPULAR_PRODUCTS)}{$POPULAR_PRODUCTS}{/if} {$RANDOM_PROD} </div> <div> {literal} <script type="text/javascript"> <script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script> plus the rest of the adsense code </script> {/literal} </div> <div id="page_content"> Thanks for any advice.
  24. clamor

    My website

    Thanks, it is still a work in progress but I am happy with the website so far. Also, I just want to say that the help from these forums has been wonderful. Like everyone else, I feel a bit frustrated at times because it is a steep learning curve. The generous support from other members in sharing their knowledge has really helped to keep me focused and on track.
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