Old products & google

[theglowcompany]

Hi,

Not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but we have been getting a few orders from products we stopped selling. I belive that this is happening due to old results in Google being once again present.

e.g. 9 months ago we sold a flashing dummy (banned a long time ago!) & this was removed appox 8 months ago. Yet if you search google - there we are. It is then possible to purchase these items even though our website has changed quite considerably.

Any ideas how to stop this?

[Mike Hughes]

It's only possible to buy it because you still have the page on your web site:

http://www.theglowcompany.co.uk/acat...G_DUMMIES.html

I could imagine that actinic maybe doesn't keep track of deleted pages on your server, so you may need to ftp into your site and manually delete the offending page. I guess, with actinic being a static site, that all the information needed to place an order is held on the product page which is why an order can still be placed.

Mike

PS. Once a search engine has a page in it's index it will usually keep it there as long as that page exists.

[theglowcompany]

thanks for the reply - makes sense.

I think this is something all users of this software should be aware of as the files are deleted from Actinic on our upload server. It can lead to orders you cant fulfil, products you no longer want to be associated with & possibly worse.

How would I ftp into the site & remove these items?

[Mike Hughes]

I use AceFTP and there's a freeware version available here: http://freeware.aceftp.com/

Once you've downloaded and installed it. Run the prgram and you'll see a button on the top LH side with a picture of a PC and a green arrow pointing to 'FTP'. Click that and then select 'new site profile'. it will ask you for a descriptive name (anything you want) the server address (probably ftp.theglowcompany.co.uk), your username and password.

Once it's set up, you click the top LH button again and double click on the name you gave and it'll connect you to your site.

You'll then see two panels on the bottom of the screen. The LHS is your PC window, the RHS is your server. Just navigate on the RHS to your acatalog directory, select the file you want to remove, right click and select 'delete'.

It's really easy once you've used it once or twice. It's just like navigating around your PC with windows.

Mike

Edit: I just checked your server. Your FTP address is just 'theglowcompany.co.uk', i.e. leave out the ftp. bit at the start.