Clicking Links in SERPS or Back Links Result In a Blank Page

[johnnysheffield]

Hi All,

First post here and a relatively new to Prestashop so please be gentle.

Around a month ago our site was upgraded to V1.5.6.2. The guy that did it had all kinds of issues with incompatible modules etc and wanted to wash his hands of it as soon as. One of the main reasons for upgrading was to get the standard mobile theme / style sheet. More recently sales dipped which led me to check GA and GWMT. I realised that our site had all but disappeared from search with only very minimal queries, impressions and clicks being received. The volume of direct traffic and Adwords traffic we get had masked a problem with organic traffic for a few weeks. I checked the header and worked out that the meta tag for GWMT wasn’t there and that the sitemap wasn’t in place etc. The settings in the Prestashop back office weren't as I would expect either so they have been corrected too. Google has now started to index the pages again and queries, impressions and clicks are looking healthier.

However... When you click on all except the home page link in the SERPS or a back link from another website the website will show up as a blank page. We’re wondering if this is why the site more or less disappeared off the radar. GWMT also reports that the site has no links.

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on and how we can correct it please? If you copy and paste the website URL (below) into the address bar it does load up. Try clicking the link below and see what happens or try searching ‘Norther Arb Supplies’ in Google. Do you get a blank screen? We get inconsistencies with browsers and devices accessing the site from different locations, sometimes it’s blank and sometimes not.

http://www.northernarbsupplies.co.uk

Also click the back link from this page (lower RH side of the 6 lozenges) and see if you get a blank page.

http://www.chipperblades.co.uk/

Settings are as follows;

Friendly URL’s – YES

Accented URL - NO

Redirect to canonical - YES

Disable apache multiviews - YES

Disable apache mod security - NO

 

Shop domain and SSL domain both - www.northernarbsupplies.co.uk

.htaccess file has been regenerated and looks fine
Robots.txt is in place and is all fairly standard

 

In the configuration information screen there is a bunch of missing files listed, with not knowing enough about Prestashop I don't know if this is relevant or not. I can list if required.

If there’s anything else I can supply to help please let me know.

Many thanks in advance.

[Prestachamps]

Hi 

I'm not 100% sure what it could be, probably because of the lack of infos. There are several things that could cause this : 

a. You could have some referral problem, like a module or something like that, for example the Presta statistical module uses actually the referral part, and as you mentioned the guy who worked had some problem on the module part. 

b. the error is a 500 error, so I would suggest checking the error long, it could be an override used by a module or something. 

In order to check and solve the problem, I'll need the access to : Admin Panel and also the FTP (I nee the FTP details in order to activate the debug=true in the config.ini to be able to see whats the exact cause for it. 

Otherwise it's just a blind testing, as nobody is capable to give you a straight answer just analyzing the site from outside. 

PS: the good part is that the site is working on the mobile version, so it's almost certain that we're talking about a module. 

Kind Regards 

 

Leo 

Ps: send me please a mail in case you need further assistance.

[johnnysheffield]

Hi Leo,

Thanks very much for your response. What you say makes absolute sense and I've actually got a guy checking the logs as I type, he too suspects a module issue. I'll be sure to come back to you if he doesn't find anything.

 

If we get a solution I'll post it on the forum. In the mean time if anyone else has any input?

 

Thank you.

Dean

[ecreeds]

Faced similar problem in 1.6.0.9

 

After checking error log we found out that classes/SearchEngine.php didnt had proper permissions, after changing the permission to 644 everything started working.

[lanski]

did you get your old positions in serp?