I’m working on a project where Google currently has over 9000 indexed entries,  most of which are comments on a K2 article accidentally left open to comments by the previous developer.

According to the instructions at Google Webmaster Tools, the “remove url” tool is not to be used except in urgent situations where private data has been shared and that using the “remove url” tool otherwise may hurt the site.

How then to get Google to crawl the indexed pages (which were removed months ago!)  and discover that they return 404 errors?

In an article by an SEO expert, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/seo/seo-pro-tip-how-to-remove-indexed-and-cached-content-urls-and-pages-from-google/1529  there is the suggestion to tweet the old url out to your followers and ask that they re-tweet it.    I guess that’s intended to make Google stand up and notice.

So here’s the page that got 9000 comments:  http://bit.ly/rIh9CB  (You’ll just get a 404, but thanks for visiting!)

Thanks for your help.   I’ll let you know what happens.

Chances are the same things have gone wrong for someone else!

Yesterday my husband got a new computer and moved his files over from an older Mac.  He was horrified to find blank  pages where his data should have been — only a few labels displayed.   Other layouts seemed to be OK.  The data — 9000+ records — seemed to be intact.  He set out to rebuild the layout for his data entry screen:  ~60 labels and fields.

I set out to find the problem.  A google search for “File Maker Pro 11 Snow Leopard blank” produced the solution:  a problem FMP has with a slightly corrupt font folder.  Turns out other people did have the same problem and that solutions were ready for the finding.   In about 15 seconds he was able to open the faulty layout, select all elements on the page and change the font to anything other than Arial.  Bingo!

So the moral is….   take time to do a search!

Today Meg and I puzzled over a Joomla! section blog that we could not get to sort properly.  We decided to edit the titles of about 40 articles in order to force them to sort chronologically.  The articles needed some other attention and we were going to have to open each one anyway.

But then,  they still wouldn’t sort properly!  So off to Google I went.

Turns out,  there’s a bug in the most recent version of Joomla  1.5.22  doesn’t sort Section blogs properly.  Who would’ve thought?  It also turned out that someone had provided a very specific solution:  Change one line of code in a particular file. 

Joomla 1.5.22 Section Blog doesn’t sort properly.

We’re web developers.  Why do we sometimes forget to use the web?