Links 276 files

So all the .doc files - and there are more than 1,500 mof them - were converted and uploaded, and the relevant htms were modified to refer to the .docx files, and all seemed well.

But two days later - possibly when the revised pages were indexed - revenue fell off a cliff edge, down 85%-90% literally overnight. After a couple of days of that the sites were reverted to the status quo ante. But it made no difference, revenue remained on the floor.

Whether the drop was caused by the converstion or was just a conincidence is anyone's guess. But if it was a coincidence it was quite a coincidence.

This page and its siblings, and excluding .docx files from indexing by means of an .htaccess entry are part of the solution. When the .docx were uploaded and referred to there was no Disallow in the robots.txt file for .docx files - there always has been a Disallow for .doc files. So some of the .docx files were crawled and indexed. How that might have caused a problem one cannot say, but in case it did and the problen wasn't a coincidental glitch, the strategy is to get essentially empty versions of all the .docx files to be crawled, then when that has happened to stop further crawling of the .docx files by adding Disallow .docx to the robots.txt files.

Then when the .htaccess is taken note of and .docx files that are currently indexed have all been un-indexed the decks will be clear. The dummy .docx can be deleted which puts things back to where they were, and where thay had been for the past twenty years.