Items filtered by date: December 2015

Firstly if your site is only a couple of days old to a few weeks this tutorial might not work.

My zencart shop had been open for 8 months and was still not listed in the search engines. This was despite have an adwords campaign and submitting a site map. A few backlinks but not many, it still should of responded to site:mywebsite.com. I had no listings at all in any search engines.

I pulled may hair out trying to fix this, i was using 1.38 with a few standard mods.

Cause:

1. Session ID's
2. NoIndex, NoFollow present on every page.

Why does this effect my search results:

Session IDs

In the case of zencart every time you visit the shop you get a session ID, this is presented via the url. This url is unique for every visit. zencart recognises a spider/bot when it visits and so does not issue a session ID to the crawler. In my shop this was not working and every time a spider/bot visited it was assigned a url with a session ID, therefore the spider/bot would never see the same page twice hurting SERPS (search engine placement).

For my site i discovered that on yahoo / alltheweb / altavista I had 14,000 links to my site in the search engines yet no search results pointing to my site, I looked more closely at these results and noticed the url was the same in everyone except the end bit 'zenid=......' These  14,000 links had caused my site to have an extremely low rating which prevented the homepage coming up the the search results. 14,000 bad pages = bad site. As far as the search engines knew my site was a spam site because they were all individual and were not verified, ie read twice. I did check this but the shop was not blacklisted, the engines would just put it down as a 'bad' site.

NoIndex, NoFollow

This is simple, this tells google, yahoo etc on every page this command is present not to index the page at all, so zencart says 'dont index this page', i do not want you too', so they dont.

Conclusions

These two errors combined will completely prevent the search engines displaying your site, even if you have submitted a sitemap and the search engines regulary visit your site. The searchbots and the computer programs that display your results in a search engine are completely different and use different criteria.

Solution (after months of thinking)

It turns out that zencart 1.38 has 2 bugs in it causing it to add NoIndex, NoFollow to every page, the session IDs added to every page is caused by user error, this is most likely to occur when you transplant a site. To fix these problems read below, not all issues might be present.

Session ID

1. Goto into the admin section, and set session path correctely (fix)
2. Check Cache folder has correct permissions, either 755 or 777 (which ever is correct for you server).
3. If the session cache is not set to a real directory (or writable directory) all spiders/bots will recieve a session id. This Tool corrects the Cache folder location. This has to be done whenever the shop is moved.
4. Make sure Spiders do not recieve session id. By default. it is. but i turned it off and on again anyway.
   
   'Sessions -> Prevent Spider Sessions' is set to True in Admin .

NoIndex, NoFollow Always Present

1. This bug is where NoIndex, NoFollow is added when display categories on the front page is set to true. (link)
   
   Admin->Configuration->Layout Settings->Categories - Always Show on Main Page = 1
    
2. There might be an error present in the html_header.php of the template where v1.38 puts NoIndex, NoFollow on every page because of bad coding.
   
   An edit of the theme (html_header.php) is required to allow indexing, by removing some 'line comment out' things. (fix response #66)

Repairing the Damage

To get rid of those unwanted links in search engines add the following to your robots.txt

User-agent:*
Disallow: *zenid=*
Disallow: /*zenid=*

when these are all done your site could get listed in the search engines within 6 hours but more than likely a couple of days. mine took six hours to get into yahoo, 12 into bing and then i was in the google cache within 24 hours, google search results about 36hours.

I have put together this information because i know i am not the only one and the solution is tricky if you are not an experienced web developer (or even if you are).

shoulders
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134865

Debugging messages are a powerful tool; however, many production systems (and test systems for that matter) have them disabled by default. If your PHP script is crashing horribly and you are not getting any runtime error messages, it is likely that this is the case for you.

You can initiate PHP debugging messages for the server by changing the display_errors and error_level settings in php.ini. Unfortunately, this is not the best situation in a production system. Luckily, you can enable error reporting on a page by page basis by simply adding the following lines to the top of your PHP script: {geshibot language="php"}

Additionally, to assist with debugging MySQL errors in PHP scripts, you can tack on an additional die clause to your MySQL queries. The following lines will cause your script to halt when a MySQL query fails, and report the error message:

{code class="brush: php"}mysql_query($query, $link_id) or die('

---

MySQL Error: ' .mysql_error(). '

---

');{/code}

If you script is not producing any error messages, please try these two methods before posting your question in the board. Remember, the community experts can only be as helpful as you are, and they can only work with what you give them.

 

• check the log files
• if the installation process is halted almost immediatley after the 'stop/failed' event this is most likely registry permissions and will be shown in the log file.

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Vista guests require the E1000 virtual NIC. Edit your vmx file and change/add the line

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000".

In VMWare the option to mount an IDE physical disk as a virtual disk is not obvious and not directely supported. All physical disks are mounted as SCSI. This is very unhelpful. Below is a work around to allow you to add an IDE physical drive as a virtual drive in VMWare.

---

• Create you virtual machine as normal
• mount the physical disk as normal (SCSI will be selected)
• Close and save the virtual machine
• edit the .vmdk file for the raw disk and changed ddb.adapterType to "ide".
• in .vmx file replace all occurences of "scsi0:0" with "ide0:0"

The physical drive can now be accessed from within VMWare as an ide drive.

You want to install XP professional and suddenly you realize that it freezes up at the mention of 34 minutes remaining! You try all your efforts to make it running but nothing seems to be working to your dismay. You try checking your RAM, checking for any bad sectors in your hard drive, even your motherboard (as I have done) but cannot make a conclusion as to what’s the answer to your woes.

So what is the solution to the defamed 34 minute XP installation hang problem?
 

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Its as simple as deleting a single file which caused the installation to freeze.

• Let the XP hang at 34 minutes remaining for the first time
• Remove the CD from the CD-ROM
• Reboot the PC by pressing the hardware reset button
• Don't enter the CD when the installation asks for it
• Open the DOS prompt (Shift + F10)
• Goto C:\Windows
  • Type setupapi.log
  • Hit enter
• The setupapi.log file will open in notepad
  • Scroll to the very last few lines in the file and search for the .inf
  • You will notice that in the last few moments the installation created a file with the extension .inf before dying out (in my case it was the faulty modem for which XP created the file mdmcxpt.inf).
  • It means that the device mentioned in the last few lines is faulty and you have to make the XP installation skip it to complete successfully.
  • Close the notepad
• Goto the folder C:\Windows\inf in command prompt
  • Browse through the files to find the .inf belonging to the faulty device.
  • Straight away delete the inf file (eg: del mdmcxpt.inf) or move it somewhere safe for later (not the /inf/ folder)
• Now put in the XP installation CD and Continue the installation

It will now not put in the drivers related to the faulty device and so it wont freeze this time !!
 

• When i choose tools -> folder options -> view, then
• I checked "Show hidden files and folders " radio box,
• then i clicked the Apply button and then Ok.
• When I open the same window again it shows that "Show hidden files and folders"radio box is unchecked.

You might also experience this problem but instead of descriptions you see a load of ??????

These issues are usually caused by active viruses. The viruses use this method to prevent removal.

---

To prevent the issue arising again a full spyware and virus scan is needed to remove the offender.

Run the registry code below and it will allow you to show hidden files again.

 

{code class="brush: powershell"}Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden] "Text"="@shell32.dll,-30499" "Type"="group" "Bitmap"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\ 00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,53,00,\ 48,00,45,00,4c,00,4c,00,33,00,32,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,2c,00,34,00,00,\ 00 "HelpID"="shell.hlp#51131" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\NOHIDDEN] "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\Advanced" "Text"="@shell32.dll,-30501" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"=dword:00000002 "ValueName"="Hidden" "DefaultValue"=dword:00000002 "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000001 "HelpID"="shell.hlp#51104" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL] "RegPath"="Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\Advanced" "Text"="@shell32.dll,-30500" "Type"="radio" "CheckedValue"=dword:00000001 "ValueName"="Hidden" "DefaultValue"=dword:00000002 "HKeyRoot"=dword:80000001 "HelpID"="shell.hlp#51105" {/code}

Every time I click on a folder and sometimes even icons on the desktop, windows installer starts and then tries to install Symantec Antivirus, which isn't even on my system anymore. If I click "cancel", my normal right click menu of choices appears.

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Download the MSI clean up utility from HERE
Double-click the file to install the utility.

On the Windows taskbar, click Start > Programs > Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to run the utility

For each entry that begins with "CC," "cc," "Norton," "Symantec," "Sym," or "MSRedist," click the entry, and then click Remove.

Reboot - done

Original Article Here

Apache Mod_Security and XAMPP