Phanton pages

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Linda Polinski
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Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2017 10:08 pm

Phanton pages

Unread post by Linda Polinski »

We are just starting to use help and manual. We bought some generic pages from a consultant, which we archived. We built our own pages. Now when I publish, some of the consultant's pages are showing up - not in the TOC. When I go to help and manual, I cannot find these pages in the toc or project files. Can you give me some suggestions on how to get rid of these phantom files? Thanks so much.
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Tim Green
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Re: Phanton pages

Unread post by Tim Green »

If the pages are really not in the project files (ALL the topic files are there, the TOC is just a list of links pointing to those files) then you are probably using WebHelp. If you publish to WebHelp without deleting the contents of the output folder any old topics that are still there will remain there as long as their names are not identical to any files being written. They will then continue to show up in the search results because the search index for WebHelp is generated from the files in the output folder.

Similarly, if you don't flush the folder for WebHelp on your web server regularly when you perform updates, you will have old leftover topic files there that will continue to be indexed by Google and other search engines.

Good practices:

1) Always select the option for deleting all files in the output folder before publishing when publishing to WebHelp.

2) Always upload to a new, empty folder on your web server. Then check that everything is working OK there. Then rename the old folder to original_name_old (or whatever) and the new folder to original_name. Only then delete the contents of the old original folder. This will both prevent panic attacks if something has gone wrong with the upload, because the original is still there, and any problems with old files.

However, always do delete the old files on the server as soon as you are sure everything is OK. Otherwise you can get lower rankings on Google and other search engines for "duplicate content".
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Linda Polinski
Posts: 15
Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2017 10:08 pm

Re: Phanton pages

Unread post by Linda Polinski »

Hi Tim,

Thanks so much for your help in the past. I am having a similar issue - we have two builds, and a page from build B is showing up in build A. So I published with delete files checked, but the errant file is still showing up.

Do you have any suggestions for me? Thanks so much!

Linda
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Tim Green
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Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
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Re: Phanton pages

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Linda,
Linda Polinski wrote:Thanks so much for your help in the past. I am having a similar issue - we have two builds, and a page from build B is showing up in build A. So I published with delete files checked, but the errant file is still showing up.
Then there is something else forcing the inclusion of the page. The most likely cause would be a link to the page in Build B somewhere that is not being removed with conditional text using the same condition that you are using to exclude the page. There is an option in View > Program Options > Compilers for handling dead links that controls this. If this is set to silently include the target page the link will force the inclusion of the page, but without a TOC entry, to prevent the link from being dead. When this happens you should see a warning message about it in the Compiler Log displayed after publishing.

The quick and dirty way to solve this is to change the compilers setting to remove the link or allow the link to be dead, but depending on the link text this might confuse your users. The better solution is to use conditional text to remove the link and insert alternative text when the page it is pointing to is removed. See this topic in the help for instructions:

https://helpandmanual.com/help/index.ht ... dlinks.htm

If this is not the cause I may need to have a look at the two projects. You can pack them in a zip and mail them to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) if necessary (or provide a Dropbox or Onedrive link if the zip is too large to mail).
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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