Migration issue from old site to Wordpress platform

[Whitey]

We've run into some issues on a migration of multiple sites onto a Wordpress platform. The sites are identical except for country TLD's.

We are not using WP multisites, rather independent installations of the same site templates.

One of the issues is that Google still shows co.uk in cache in place of .com for the home page only. Inner pages are ok

Any ideas on how this is happening and how to fix it ?

[not2easy]

Have you tried "Googlebot Fetch" in GWT? Sometimes that can speed up bringing their attention to a change. Is co.uk still a valid site or does it redirect?

[Whitey]

Yes - we did use Google fetch to speed up the crawl process. All the sites are legit, so .co.uk is a separate site and it is not redirected to .com .

[lorax]

My reply during a sticky exchange:

I have not heard of this exact issue but I have heard of weird things happening when people get tricky with Geo location sniffers. I strongly suspect it's a setup issue though I'm not sure what exactly. If I were you, and if at all possible, I would kill all caching and the http accelerator so I could determine what's real. Give it at least 72 hours to purge. Then you can turn things back on one at a time and test as you go.

I'd also check robots.txt, htaccess, and look for any caching files from the old plugin and kill them.

[Whitey]

Yep - that's great advice, on top of that we have a server migration as the old one is on the limit. We're putting it all on Amazon Elastic.

The current old server crashed with the WP cache plug in and we've been riding rough shod for 3 weeks while we wait for the move to take place, propping up the site with some server admin band aid solutions. It's likely our web accelerator might be causing some dramas - who knows [ Varnish - Cache ].

Add to that duplicate content paths and you know what I'm dealing with :)

I've brought in a contractor who specialises in tech SEO / architecture, works with WP amongst others and will strip everything back to basics following the migration, which is to be done shortly. He liked your way of thinking.

Sometimes I assume developers understand SEO, and time and experience should have taught me that is the mother of all stuff ups [ to assume :) ].

Hopefully I won't get caught with a lot of re-dev work.

[edited by: lorax at 7:09 pm (utc) on Apr 22, 2014]
[edit reason] typo [/edit]

[lorax]

Brilliant! The best advice I can give (and I give to anyone with almost any troubleshooting issue like this) is to get back to a basic install and see if the problem still exists.

If not then you know it's a plugin or theme issue. Slowly turn things back on or un-comment the code blocks and test as you go.

If it does, then your core files or database might be borked and look into those.

If all else fails, reinstall WordPress and then add your customizations and plugins back one at a time and test as you go.

[Whitey]

Just thought I'd update some communication with a contractor that we bought in to review the site installations.

"We analyzed the site through FTP, Google Index, and cache archives. There are several inconsistencies which we have found, including some complex ones but some very basic in nature. Like the absence of standard WordPress installation procedures.

The site theme has inconsistencies which are resulting in the crashes, when some of the plugins have been disabled. In such cases those plugins which provide data to main themes needs to be either incorporated within the theme or fixed to let theme function independently.

Before we proceed to the transfer/migration, it will take more time to properly understand the theme and suggest what tweaks we could do to the theme module. We think it's more than just server problems, and that the issue is with the theme and plugins."

Hopefully, I'll have a full report in 2-3 days.

[Whitey]

Well the report picked up some SEO configuration disasters with duplicate content paths ;'noindex,follow' of home page ; erroneous use of wrong Canonical URL's on inner pages ; 200ok on 404 pages ; dynamic ur's producing loops with ?'s etc ... and so on

How can such sloppy undisciplined use of plugins and lack of SEO knowledge by developers lead to this. I wonder why Wordpress doesn't produce a tool to health check a site's SEO [ or maybe they do ], aside from WMT.