Around late July I tried out a new plugin. That plugin was the Automatic Wordpress Upgrade plugin. I thought it performed reasonably well, though it didn’t restart all of my plugins. I didn’t see that as much of a big deal and added it to my permanent arsenal of plugins. Then I found an inadvertent time bomb.
The issue is that the plugin creates a .htaccess file as part of its upgrade process. While there’s a lot of sensible logic behind that, it does have one nasty side effect. It gets rid of your own .htaccess file. While that might be a bit of a pain, you wouldn’t expect it to have major consequences would you? Well it does. I noticed that my traffic had plummeted over the last couple of days and I was getting worried. My other site was showing no change in traffic so I could reasonably assume it wasn’t backlogged reporting on the stats. I fished around a little and noticed that my PR had dropped from 5 to 4. That could certainly account for some of it, but I still wasn’t convinced. I continued my hunt, this time fishing around the community to see if anything big was on the go. Apparently there had been last month, but nothing right now. I found it rather odd that Google PR would change and no one would be talking about it. My experience has also taught me that PR doesn’t change on just one site at a time. It’s done in a global sweep. Odd.
Then it came to me, like a bolt of painful, painful lighting. I put http://lastblogger.com/ in my browser, then http://www.lastblogger.com/. Two different PRs… One 4, one 5. Oh no! I knew immediately what the problem was, but the gut wrenching part was when I realised that since it took about a month from the time of my .htaccess file to be replaced to the time of my loss in traffic, it’s going to take about a month to reverse that trend as well.
So what happened? I lost my redirect that redirected all of the www.lastblogger.com to lastblogger.com. Without that redirect in place, Google identifies each one as a separate site. Depending on how people linked to my blog, those links might go to either one. That means I’ve effectively split my incoming links from Google’s perspective. That’s not good.
On the bright side, it’s already fixed and things will be back to normal in a short while, but it’s still not a pleasant experience.
So, yet another painful lesson learned. On the bright side, the more a lesson hurts, the longer you’re likely to remember the lesson.
plugin, Wordpress
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4 responses so far ↓
1 ws // Aug 27, 2007 at 8:38 pm
if you have control over it, you might consider putting the code that redirects www. to the apache configuration file. That way, you don’t have to worry if your .htaccess file gets wiped out.
Moving all the htaccess code to the apache config file (if it’s feasible) has a slight performance advantage.
2 Marc // Aug 27, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Unfortunately, on the host I’m on it’s not an option. The only way to alter the web server is through the .htaccess file.
3 Tay // Sep 16, 2007 at 4:12 am
Wow, that’s horrible. I know I’m more than a bit late on commenting but I was very interested in this post. I’ve been considering getting the automatic upgrade plugin, but now I think I won’t. I’m sorry you had to go through all of this. Best of luck!
4 Marc // Sep 16, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I think horrible’s a little strong
A bummer that’s for sure, but since I was able to identify the problem quickly and take steps to fix it, it’s really just a minor setback.
As for the plugin itself, this is one of the few problems that I’ve encountered with it. So I don’t want to make people think it’s a bad plugin. It’s just that automating something for people means that tey may not be aware of everything that’s being done in the background. Sometimes that’s a good thing. In this case, it wasn’t.