Lost Product Review: 4370 Words Down the Drain.Almost!
I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack today.
For about one hour of agony, I was practically screaming and pulling out my hair.
After spending many long hours researching and writing a “War and Peace” product review yesterday, happiness turned to extreme stress, and serenity turned to madness
Today my long hard work became a lost product review of 4370 words that nearly washed down the drain….almost!
Don't Do What I Did
You should never change the permalink of a page or post after it gets indexed. Or even worse, is ranking well in the SERPs. You will get a 301 redirect leading to a 404 Page Error. You will lose all of your traffic.
That is like gospel here at WA.
And it will be a severe pain in the assets to fix.
Never do this.
However, in the beginning before your post gets indexed, it’s perfectly acceptable to change your permalink. For many reasons.
You might want to edit your permalink to match your focus keyphrase (main keyword) to get better SEO. You might want to also match your permalink to your meta title if you later found a better one, and if so now is the best time to do it.
But you need to be very careful.
Don’t convince yourself to work when you are in a non-optimal mental state.
Or are in a half dream-state.
Beware of common household accidents like what happened to me today when you are not paying attention (or half asleep as in my case).
Don’t do what I did.
Never change the permalink or your post to the SAME permalink you used for a previous post!
And that goes for pages too!
This certainly bears repeating….NEVER CHANGE THE PERMALINK TO THE SAME PERMALINK YOU USED BEFORE ON YOUR WEBSITE!
All weird stuff will happen.
Watch what happens.
Product Review Gone... Replaced by One Paragraph
Within seconds ALL of my 4370 words were GONE, KAPUT!
Replaced by one paragraph of text!!
You heard that…Gone WITHOUT A TRACE and No Where to be Found.
Over the course of several hours, I was in contact back and forth with Site Support, and also emailing the Theme Support Tech Team. No response from the latter.
I must say, we definitely do have a quick responsive Site Support here at WA.
By the way, this is what the original Featured Image and Intro of the product review looked like + 4300 WORDS:
Site Support was able to retrieve and send me a link to a backup from yesterday – but when I opened the content my heart practically sank…..
All the beautiful formatting I worked so hard on was GONE, and I was also missing 350 words of important content.
This was all the remained……..
The best case scenario would have cost me at least 3-4 hours of re-formatting, as the original beautiful formatting, the link buttons, the text formatting, and even Featured Image were all gone! Plus I’d have to change adjust all the formatting separately in Tablet and Mobile view.
Sure I saved a backup of my website, but I’d added a “small piece” of new content since my last backup (that 4370 word product review!).
Yes, I also saved my content on a separate file and on an external drive.
None of this would matter though.
A Stroke of Uncanny Luck
This is slightly convoluted, but I will try to simply it.
The plugin I use has a style independent of how it appears in WordPress. If you save your Page or post in the plugin on the WordPress dashboard, then revert back to the WordPress editor, there’s a risk you will lose all the work you saved when you go back to the plugin.
Site Support suggested I try to restore a previous version of the post in WordPress.
But I was afraid of going back to a previous revision in WordPress, knowing there would be a risk I could choose the wrong revision (and there were 133 of them!), then when going back to the plugin I would lose all the styling and formatting forever.
So I was hoping Site Support had a backup of the styled plugin version, but when they told me they didn’t have a backup of the plugin styled version, that to be on the safe side I should use the plugin’s “clone” feature to duplicate the post before attempting to restore the revision.
What is about to follow was totally unexpected and shocking.
Thankfully incredible luck was on my side. And hats off to the plugin designers for thinking of everything! Even Site Support wasn’t expecting this!
This Story Has a Happy Ending
After I “cloned” the formatted version that was a “MESS” (the Original backup Site Support sent me after changing the permalink) and clicked the “Preview” link, I couldn’t believe my eyes…...
The “cloned” copy of the BAD version turned out to be the Original Beautiful Version!
Lost product Review NOW FOUND!
Exactly in the same condition as it was, all 4370 words.
Not a hair missing.
Woo Hoooo!
That’s like making a copy of a brown mouse in front of a trap…..
...and getting back a White Duck that Quacks!
Actually in my case, a beautiful Swan!
Ladies and Gents, you can be sure of one thing…. .
Next time I will make sure I get a few extra hours of zzzzzzz’s…..and make certain I am in a higher state of awareness before performing an important task.
Moral of the Story: NEVER change the permalink to the SAME permalink you used on another page.
Lesson well learned!
Bullet dodged….Disaster averted.
Thanks for being my sounding board, my Friends.
I really needed to get this out.
Cheers,
Kaju
Recent Comments
126
When you write out your long title, that becomes the initial permalink. Good seo practice is to shorten that link and have the keyword phrase included, before you publish the post.
I just did this a couple posts back where I forgot to shorten my link before publishing. But I caught it right away and fixed it, updated the post, and well before search engines had any chance to index it.
Sorry to hear of your frustrations. It happens to the best of us sometimes.
Geoff.
Thanks. That's true Geoff, if you have Settings>Permalink set to Post Title in your Dashboard, it will automatically take the title as the permalink. But it's usually too long.
That's what I do. I first make sure after I finding my low hanging fruit keyword to include it in the meta title and within the meta description, then go back and shorten the permalink title and include the keyword in more than 1/2 of that permalink. This is good SEO practice.
These kind of accounting errors can easily happen when we are half asleep and not at full capacity. It's surprising it doesn't happen even more often!
Glad could fix this, it was a close one!
Kaju
Phew! Close call and a timely reminder to us all of what NOT to do. So glad it had a happy ending.
C&P
Close one indeed C & P! I'm glad to share this with my friends and the community so they won't get into this kinda mess! Thanks!
Kaju
Something to take head about! I have been in a drowsy state and did something which I regretted online before... For most important things online I now make sure wide awake or I leave it for later.. I understand your frustration and now happiness! Happy it worked out.
This is great advice W, we need to be in an alert state when we are doing important tasks online:) Or one evening you will see your pages all disappear! Thanks:)
I appreciate that Glen, hoping others learned something here from my near disaster also:)
Darn! I knew I should have used the photo of that PHOENIX, Joe! (LOL!). Shaking off the ashes!
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I will surely take care my friend, Thanks.
Thank You Garauv, this can easily happen if you are half-focused.
Take care!
Kaju