[Raymond]

Hi Steven,

I have some problems with the connections search widget that I add to sidebars. As soon as you type a letter it takes you off to another page when pressing enter!

Second is that when you use the search on the page you were taken to, it pulls up WordPress Posts instead of Connection entries!?

Site: http://www.swissgiraffe.com/

Thanks

Ray

[Steven Zahm]

@ Ray

re: I have some problems with the connections search widget that I add to sidebars. As soon as you type a letter it takes you off to another page when pressing enter!
A plugin or the theme is wrapping the search widget with a link to your site. So when you click on it, you are taken to that page. Here’s the page source:

<section id="cnw_search-3" class="widget widget_cnw_search">
<div class="widget-wrap">
<h4 class="widget-title widgettitle">
<a href="http://www.swissgiraffe.com/directory/travel/hotels/">Looking for something?</a></h4>
<a href="http://www.swissgiraffe.com/directory/travel/hotels/">
<form role="search" method="get" action="http://www.swissgiraffe.com/">
<span class="cn-search">
<input type="text" id="cn-search-input" name="cn-s" value="" placeholder="Search">
<input type="submit" name="" id="cn-search-submit" class="cn-search-button" value="" tabindex="-1">
</span>
</form>
</a>
</div>
</section>

Both the widget title and the entire search form is being wrapped in a link that goes to this URL:
http://www.swissgiraffe.com/directory/travel/hotels/

I have no idea what plugin or why the theme would do this. My suggestion is start deactivating plugins to find the one causing the trouble.

re: Second is that when you use the search on the page you were taken to, it pulls up WordPress Posts instead of Connection entries!?
Do you have your home page set as the directory home page? If you do, you can not do that because WordPress has issues properly detecting registered query vars in plugins and becomes “confused”, so it shows the blog archive page. I do have code that tries to fix this which is most instances, unfortunately not all.

[Raymond]

The problem plugin seems to be the Genesis Extender Plugin! This an important one for me to have! Any ideas what I can do as a solution?

As for the second issue, the main directory is set as the first page you land. Perhaps I could try the code you have and see if that resolves the issue.

Thanks
Ray

[Steven Zahm]

@ Ray

Well, I really dislike when I have to say this because I like resolving the issues … but you’ll have to ask the Genesis Extender Plugin support team. I do not have access to the plugin or its code so all I can do is guess that its has to do something with its custom home page options or maybe its custom contents feature??? I don’t know just pulling that from its product description page.

The code I spoke of, that is already in Connections. My guess is it is being preempted by the the Genesis Extender Plugin custom home page features. The like only solution will be to create a “Results” page with on the [connections] shortcode on it, no options and then set it as the directory home page.

Hope that helps!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Steven Zahm. Reason: Add tag

[Raymond]

Hi Steven,

I’ll send an email to the Cobalt Apps and see if they can help out. Will let you know if they offer some advice.

Regards to the second issue, I deactivated the Extender plugin but it still gives me the problem. I was also just thinking that as I have many directories on the site, if I use the search button in the sidebar that is not the landing page, the person searching is always going to be taken away from that specific page to a “Results”page. Ideally I want them to stay on that specific directory. For now I will just use the search short code option and leave the main page with a search widget leading to a results page! Of course that depends on Cobalt finding a solution.

Just one last thing that you might be able to help with….I have set all my pages that have the [connections] short-code on to no-index and no-follow. I have also set the whole WordPress to no-index while I am developing the site.

I noticed that when I do a site:swissgiraffe.com with google search there are over 3,770 results showing for the domain which seems excessive and 98% are all something to do with connections! I am worried that this will have an affect on SEO, especially as I have only started adding listings and have only two posts. This was also before I added the Extender plugin.

Any ideas why it’s doing this?

Cheers

Ray

[Steven Zahm]

@ Ray

Because you’ve manually separated out the Connections entries on separate pages there’s really no way for the search widget to figure out which page it should directs the search. That’s why there’s the need for a results page.

As far as the no-index … don’t know, Connections has nothing to do with the no-index page meta tags and robots.txt file. It does not set or alter whatever is set to. It does not even look.

My guess is the site was indexable at one point. I would expect those to drop from the index at what ever time frame Google uses.

And looking at what is in the index, it appears that you did at one point have the category drop down. Google will following these “deep” links But since you’ve manually separated out the directory, you shouldn’t use the category drop down. Which, from my quick look, you are no longer using it.

Even with the category drop down not being used, I would still expect a large number in the index. Think about it for a second … you have many countries (21), in each on those pages you have a character index, so at the very minimum you have 21 countries x 26 in the index = 546. Then you have cities and towns and featured directories. So, it’ll add up, very quick.

Now, in theory, each of these should have different results from Connections (of course there’ll be some overlap) resulting in pages with unique content, so I do not see how it’ll negatively impact you in Google’s index. Sidenote, many of these pages are still empty (no results) … so, you’ll want to address that before going live.

Hope that helps!

[Raymond]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your reply,

Yep the site is not set live yet to search engines, at least while I populate the empty pages with entries and you’re right it was live in the beginning for about a week. Perhaps Google did crawl while I had the drop down menu on the page.

Anyway…..I’ll monitor it over the next few weeks/months to see what happens, I reckon as it’s a new site too, it takes time for Google to pass by.

Will let you know too if the Cobalt support can fix the problem with the widget search.

Cheers
Ray

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