danbashaw

Thanks Nick – The fix is working perfectly, and I really like the well thought out interface improvements you have made in 2.0 as well. Much appreciated!

A follow-up to close out this thread.

Delightful Download PDFs are in fact indexing organically based on the short Delightful Download URLs. Google spiders the URL and presents it (Rather than the resolved absolute URL of the PDF) in the search results for both google CSE and Google search.

PDFs of any kind can take a considerable length of time to be indexed, which is probably why I was not seeing results even several days after submission of an XML sitemap.

Notes;

– Indexing is the behaviour with Directory Protection turned off. I do not know what the indexing behaviour would be with protection turned on.

– Given that indexing does work, I expect robots.txt rules would apply as they do for any URL, so if for some reason you did not want Delightful Downloads URLs to be indexed or followed, a rule could be written to exclude them.

Ashley – Thanks again for an excellent product! I appreciate you keeping Delightful Downloads actively supported, along with all your other work commitments.

Cheers, Dan

As a follow-up, so far it appears that PDFs uploaded with Delightful Downloads do not get indexed by Google Search or Google CSE. I suspect that the indexing spider cannot follow the jump when the parameter https://example.com/?ddownload=1234 resolves to the actual absolute path of the PDF at https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/here-is-the-document.pdf.

Ashley, can you confirm that this is the case? If so I’ll work around the issue by submitting a manual XML sitemap of the final URLs to the search engines.

Cheers, Dan

Thanks Nick!

In our case, we are using a custom child theme that references the Genesis theme directly, rather than using a StudioPress ‘official’ child theme. It surprises me a bit that StudioPress would choose to abstract something this fundamental from the framework itself.

Thanks again for looking into this so rapidly, and for your great plugin! I appreciate you adding the needed CSS to the plugin itself, for use cases like ours.

Cheers – Dan

Thanks Ashley – I’ll watch for the update, and will tip on arrival! ?? I’ll also be first in line for the Pro version when it becomes available. Cheers, Dan

@rcwatson, I notice now that Ashley has posted a notice that he is no longer monitoring the support forum or offering direct support, so I have posted the request on Github. (See: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/support-108?replies=1) I’ll let you know what comes of the request.

I hope not, since it is a great modern plugin and Ashley is an excellent developer. The last update was mid-July, so I think it is still an active project.

I notice that Ashley is working at a new position, and since free plugins are a sideline for developers, they sometimes have to be set aside when other demands are high. (That’s why I encourage developers to commercialize their plugins, since even a few hundred dollars a year in income can help to keep a plugin active and under development. That’s a lot harder for a developer to do if the plugin is a completely volunteer effort.)

I’ll see if Ashley responds to my “Will-Pay-For-Features” pitch!

Hi Ashley — Would you be interested in adding this custom URL feature if some funding was made available for you to do it? It would be very handy for a project we have currently underway. If you are interested, please contact me at dan.bashaw[at]pathwisesolutions.com and let me know how much it would cost.

Cheers, Dan