store index.php ?

[david52]

Greetings, My buddy has a few errors in his store, nothing major but I would like to fix them for him. The site is under me as a subdomain http://edscukoouhren.com/clock_store/

On this link http://jeanscountry.net/jeans_store/

he has edited a few links at the top. now not the "Home" link on the top left side. there is another "Home" link that is not heighlighted and I believe this is 1 of the 3 errors. I have been into both configure.php files to take a look but I cannot see the issue. Can someone please turn me onto a link. I have checked the faq's and I am still searching.
tks in advance
david 52,

when I get this issue straight then i will move on to number two.

[nigelt74]

So you mean the breadcrumbs "Home" link, the one that appears to the right of the category list and above the "Welcome to our store"?

That isn't supposed to be "highlighted" as you say on the home page, it is supposed to have no link on it because it is the active page, as soon as you click on one of the links in the category box it will become 'Highlighted', but the category name that appears next to it wont be highlighted as that will be the currently active page

[nigelt74]

Ok looking at your first link, on that store the breadcrubs appear to be turned off

Is that what you are trying to do?

admin --> configuration --> layout settings --> Define Breadcrumb Status

and set the status to what you want

[david52]

http://jeanscountry.net/jeans_store/
on this link here is what i am asking about. the Lets call it the 2nd home button. It states "Home" but it is in black and dead. I would like to get it working to see if that is why google sitemap and sitemap generator are shooting me a bad link. On the rest of the pages to his store, the 2nd "Home" is Heilighted". that is why i do not understand why it wil not work on the index page. What I would like to do is link that back to his original index page

http://jeanscountry.net
then sitemap generator should index his store.

As for Edscukoouhren that is my store and how do turn on this on my site once I do get his working.
tks for the response from new zealand, I got a buddy that went there from the states and lives in auckland now.
Regards,
david52

[gjh42]

As Nigel said in post 2, that "Home" is functioning correctly now. If it were a link, it would point to the same page it is on, which would be stupid. Now changing it to point to the "main home" is reasonable; that would take some PHP recoding. However, that might not be the best link to point back to the main site. The top link might make more sense for that, depending on circumstances. In any case, the one that points to a different site should be clearly labeled differently from the ones that point to the store home page.

However, you should consider whether you really need landing/content pages outside of Zen Cart. All of your current pages can be recreated inside the ZC structure giving no need to recode your ZC.

[nigelt74]

No the breadcrumbs bit won't cause any issues

The reason for your errors in your sitemap generation is you are using 2 different domains

you are using

http://www.jeanscountry.net/jeans_store/ for zencart
and
http://jeanscountry.net/

for the rest of the stuff, note that your zencart is configured to use www and your http://jeanscountry.net/ page isn't

If this is a new site then i would say set up a .htaccess redirect to redirect the non-www version of the site to the www version

If you go the other way, redirecting www to non-www, then you need to alter zencarts configure files

Also Don't ever ever put hidden directories in your robots.txt files, as that will only stop good bots, not bad bots,
or people looking to see if there is a robots.txt issue blocking the sitemap from running. I shouldn't be able to see how to get into you sitemap generator


I put your site through this
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/Default.aspx

to find the error

[david52]

Nigel, tks for the response. The www issue cured the problem. that solves the issues with webmaster tools. As for seeing the generator I have it set the way support tells me to set it from sitemap xml forum. Let me shoot you the robots.txt and tell me if I am rite will ya. I want it to index the front page http://www.jeanscountry.net

and the the store links and images as it does now. Here is what I got on the .txt file

User-agent: *
Allow: / index follow
Disallow: /protected
Disallow:/generator

Am i ok on this? you know what i am getting at. I want the spiders to crawl on the site but not on scripts they do not need to hit.
tks
david52

[nigelt74]

Nope thats the exact wrong way to do it.

a robots.txt is to tell search engines what publicly accessible/visible parts of your website to not index, for instance your login and checkout pages are both publicly accessible as in they can be found by clicking around on your website, but you wouldn't want them to be indexed by a search engine.

A robots.txt should never be used to disallow access to non publicly accessible/visible areas, like your /generator and /protected directory
These 2 directories aren't accessible via your site are they?, there are no links to them. A search engine will only find directories if something actually links to those directories.
By putting your two directories in your robots.txt, you've done two things

1) all good search engines won't index them, BUT those search engines would never have find them in the first place
2) Provided a link and a big flashing signpost for all naughty search engines and hackers scripts telling them that these directories are important and telling them where they are.

You are much better off and safer if you just have an empty robots.txt file

or something like this

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /jeans_store/index.php?main_page=popup_image*

sitemap: http://www.jeanscountry.net/sitemap.xml

[nigelt74]

Also if a good search engine does happen on the directory in the case of your generator one, the sitemap generator login/index page has a noindex tag on it anyway which would tell the search engine not to index it anyway.

but never ever ever put anything you don't want a hacker to know in a robots.txt file

[david52]

tks, NIgel I took yur advice on the robot.txt
See I am self taught on all this thru books and forums for i know nothing about in 2008. But I will seek more advice in the future. Enjoy your fall season over there now and we will enjoy our spring after a snoiwstorm comming nxt week.
I password protected the generator page too per ur commet on you or no one else should be able to view the genertor. See sitemap never suggested that on that generator program and it was there to password protect but the pdf files tell you nothing about it.
Regards Mate
David