[Plugin: Google Bot Bling] Just doesn't appear to be working

Hi Lucas,

There are a couple easy ways to test Google Bot Bling..

First, make sure that you’ve set your email address correctly in the admin control panel. Also double check there’s a filename in the Filename area.

Next, visit your website using the test argument. This should be formatted as https://www.thisismyurl.com/test=%5Bfilename%5D (but replace this with your filename and URl.

This will force Google Bot Bling to execute the code. Once that’s done, verify the code worked by opening https://www.thisismyurl.com/%5Bfilename%5D (again, replace this with your address / filename) and you’ll see that it executed.

If you’re not receiving an email, contact your hosting company to ask why. The plugin uses the PHP mail() function, some hosting companies disable or limit this feature.

Hi Christopher – 1st off grats on a good tool! I have this installed on my site (equalprint.co.uk) and it works a treat tells me google is crawling it all the time! I have installed this on one of my clients websites (leylandcleaningservices.co.uk) that site doesn’t seem to be getting reported on? They are both hosted with the same company and im scratching my head a bit? any ideas?

Many Thanks..Matt

Hi Matt,

There are a couple possible things.

Ensure that you’ve tried testing the script with the https://thisismyurl.com/?test=%5Bfilename%5D option. This will trigger the script to run, which should tell you if the problem is in the script firing routine or the email function.

Some hosting companies (bluehost for example) will only send emails from valid accounts, by default the script tries to send emails from the site administrator. Try changing the email to the same as your own blog to see if the error is related to email accounts.

Chris

Hi. I also have a problem with this plugin. After executing the test command, I don’t have any file in the https://www.thisismyurl.com/filename. Security issues? Please help.

Thank you

Hi Smile, remember to replace https://www.thisismyurl.com/ with your own server name but if the file still isn’t appearing, it could be that your web server does not allow for files to be written.

An easy solution is to create the file yourself, the change the permissions to 777 so that the script can write to it.

created the file, give it the 777 permission but the file stays empty.

I have found that the plugin works if I set the main directory permission to 777 – but that I don’t think is the right approach…

is it possible to redirect the output to some other directory that we don’t have security risk?

I suppose technically, if you set the directory in your filename settings (ie to wp-content/uploads/filename.txt it should work. I’ll take a look as well and let you know.

Tried setting a custom path in the filename but it doesn’t work.

The link in the “Your file will be downloadable from” section is ok, but the file remains empty, will all security disabled.

i’m getting emails all the time saying that my site as been indexed by google. but what i think it’s really reporting is general activity on my site, ie, anytime anything is requested… searches, link clicks, etc. it really doesn’t seem to know what’s google and what’s just normal site activity.

do have this installed correctly, or is this a possible bug? a big one?

@biofuels

Of course anything is possible but most likely Google is simply indexing your site. I get 200+ pages indexed per day on many of my blogs, but if you want to test it for yourself an easy test it to pick a deep page and visit it. If you get an email immediately identifying that page, it could be an issue however the method for identifying pages is specific to the GoogleBot so I would be very surprised.

@smile-

Each server is extremely unique and it’s almost impossible to accommodate all configurations. However, the most common error is that your path is not writable for the file. One quick fix I’ve seen work in the past is to add wp-content/uploads/ before the file name and the script will attempt to write to the primary upload directory. If that fails, adding a year and month folder that already exists works in some cases. For example, wp-content/uploads/2010/01/filename.txt may work for you.

Thank you for your reply. I’m still looking into this to see what might be going on, but here’s a little more feedback on the issue I’m seeing. With regard to the secret file, it contains various links from my site, and appears to be updating regularly, so presumably this has the appropriate permissions. What’s strange is that the file contains search links, for example: https://www.mydomain.com/?s=long&submit.x=0&submit.y=0, which is generated when a search is performed. The corresponding emails that I receive indicate that google has indexed the search url, which seems a seems a bit odd. I’m not sure how google would even know that search was performed. I’m creating an auto sitemap, but it does not include search URLs.

Christopher,
I installed your plugin on the site I am working on and it runs but it doesn’t give all of the page as being hit. It just hits the URL home.
When I ran the test string against it, then I get a list of all pages being hit. It there something I am missing?