[Plugin: WP Minify] FEATURE REQUEST – Keep Cache File Names the Same cuz Bots Hate changes

  • Kimberly

    (@kellogg9)


    11 years, 9 months ago

    I keep getting errors from google bot saying the wp-minify js and css files dont exist. Its because this plugin constantly keeps changing their names when it goes about refreshing the content (or i modify the content). Because of that i could imagine search engine bots would penalize for the constant problems occuring on the site (dead js/css files).

    So i think you should have an option to keep file names the same (and allow the user to provide the names ideally). So when you refresh and rebuild there is always the same file name there.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter Kimberly

    (@kellogg9)

    11 years, 9 months ago

    Decided to update this plugin myself by writing a new function to handle my about feature request. It works very well. It doesnt touch any of the functions but just adds a new one that simply makes the file names more consistent. So if the files to be combined are the same then the md5 that is used for the final name wont change (i sort the files “names” before applying the md5 function). It also doesnt use last modified date of a file when calculating the md5, which this plugin was doing (causing constantly changing names) since that will modify the final name too.

    This helps tremendously since it now resolves many search engine spiders not finding missing css and js files like before which should help in seo ranking.

    It should be noted though that the file names will change if the # of files it uses changes. Other than that the final name used is now static. In

    joel_birch

    (@joel_birch)

    11 years, 9 months ago

    Sounds interesting, but I assume the name change thing is for cache-busting, so that browsers download updated CSS and JS files.

    What do you think about simply adding the CSS and JS files to a robots.txt file, telling Google not to index them?

    Disallow: /*.js$
    Disallow: /*.css$

    Thread Starter Kimberly

    (@kellogg9)

    11 years, 9 months ago

    I was thinking the same thing (adding to robot.txt) but soon after i read (and viewed a clip) from Google that they highly prefer you NOT prevent their bots from looking at js and css files because they use them to verify that no spam is on a site. The person was saying by having it disallowed it makes their bots suspicious and could hurt ranking.

    joel_birch

    (@joel_birch)

    11 years, 9 months ago

    Good point!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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