I created a customer account in my site for testing purposes and placed a paid "Premium Listing" as a regular customer would. When the listing expired I simply clicked RENEW and the listing was instantly renewed as a free listing without giving me the option of going thru the payment process. I'm still unable to launch the website because these important issues keep coming up. Thanks for your assistance, Edwin
i have not tested this on my site. however if this is the case. I will be unable to launch as well ><!
I'm very excited about this directory theme. This theme is very classy and clean looking for the customers an easy to use. There are not really too many customizations to do on it. Anytime I have a support inquiry it is resolved in a timely manner. I test every aspect of the theme as I do anytime I build a website. I create a couple of "Pretend Customer Accounts", then I test everything from posting a listing, to email notifications, customer forgot password, payments, renewals, etc. I set up a testing price of $1 and run real PayPal transactions. Then I see that everything is working properly. I'm very excited about this directory theme. I have a couple of websites where I run Google Adsense, but its not paying out as expected. It’s like I have no control of earnings with Google. Every time I get clicks they are deemed invalid. I want to operate about 5 of these GeoCraft Directory sites so I can have more of a steady recurring income. I focus on “Per City Niches” and usually have good results on SEO for search results on page 1 or 2 of Google and Yahoo for my targeted keywords. Once I fine tune this directory, I will model it for other cities and niches. Edwin
Hi Edwin, Apparently, you have an online business experience. I asked myself question whether to start a local site (I have allready a domain like : citynamexxxxxx.com) or national across the country. I hesitated by that if I run a local site and earns success, to launch across the country, I have two options: 1 - Change the domain name to a new one .In this case , I will lose my ranking on google ... or 2-create a 2nd site (with another domain) model exactly like my local site. Also in this case, I am afraid of being penalized by Google for duplicate content. I hope I made myself understood and your advice will be welcome. Thank you in advance.
Hi aliounn, I'll be glad to give you some input on this. Through lots of research and years of trial and error I have gained a lot of experience on this. When I have a little more time within the next 24 hours I will provide you some information on this. Not a problem at all.
The process for Expired Premium Listing would be that the user can instantly Renew the listing as a Free Listing. If he wants to renew his listing again as premium listing, he had to go to edit listings page on his dashboard and click the upgrade listing button to make his listing premium.
Hello Krish, I'm not going to be offering free listings in my site. I will look in the settings to turn off free option. Then I'll test it again and will update you. Thanks, Edwin
Okay, so I made the free listing a yearly listing payment option to make sure the free option is disabled. However, I have it DEACTIVATED from the front end so customers will not see it or have it as a package option. I then logged in from a different computer as a customer would and upgraded my free listing to paid premium. I noticed that when my listing was free it had 10 hours left before it was to expire. When I upgraded to paid, the expiration time remained the same, 10 hours. The way I see it, when the customer upgrades to paid PREMIUM, the listing period should RESTART as they are paying to be premium for that amount of time advertised or promised. This should not be an issue for my first GeoCraft directory site because I'm not going to have free listings, but I may do free listings on upcoming sites.
Has this been solved? "The process for Expired Premium Listing would be that the user can instantly Renew the listing as a Free Listing. If he wants to renew his listing again as premium listing, he had to go to edit listings page on his dashboard and click the upgrade listing button to make his listing premium." So all expired premium listings revert back to free listings if they were expired and clicked to renew? In essence, the premium members must re-list their listing. Or pay through a custom invoice to get the admin to upgrade old listing to premium again? Thanks,
Well..... this is very disappointing. I had turned off FREE listings in my site. Yet, when I renewed the expired listing as a customer, it renewed for free. In addition I had just upgraded the listing to PAID PREMIUM and the listing still expired in the time the previously free listing was set to expire. I don't know if I'm clear on this explanation but in the end here is what I would be looking for as a solution from this issue. 1) Lets say a customer has a free listing for 30 days. Now on the 29th day the customer upgrades to paid premium for a 30 days period. That listing should not expire the next day which would be the 30th day of the original free posting. That listing's expiration day should be refreshed. 2) Because I will not be running free postings in my site, listings should not be automatically renewed for FREE. I love the layout of this theme, but if I can't get this payments and renewal part working there is no way I'm going to be able to move forward with it.
In reference to duplicate content: If you check almost any website using copyscape dot com, you will find that almost all sites are considered to have duplicate content. That is the same type of robot Google uses to detect duplicate content. Except Google is even better. So one of the things you can do is to not copy everything exactly, and rename or use different images. You will not be penalized for using the same layout or template, just in case you were wondering about that. I don't think you would duplicate the same exact site and just use different domains expecting to have the same customers advertising. In reference to changing domains: You can change domain without loosing page rank or being penalized.You can also pass the link juice to your new domain. You can accomplish that by using a 301 redirect from your old domain to the new domain. As long as the sites are of the same concept you will be fine. If you have a domain about "real estate" and then get a domain about "Football" and use a 301 redirect that will not work. It may work for a few weeks but when Google re-crawls the sites they are likely to detect that those sites are not related. Then you will loose that link juice and page rank. They may even penalize your site as spam. This is because otherwise anyone could buy an expired domain with page rank and automatically pass page rank; I have tried that too, doesn't work. Even when done correctly you may find that you can loose the page rank for weeks until Google re-crawls site. Keep in mind that PAGE RANK is exactly that "page rank" not website rank. You can go from page rank 0 to 2 over night and also from 4 to 0 overnight. That's why the only thing you can control is QUALITY CONTENT. Keep in mind that a higher page rank doesn't mean automatically top results. About 301 redirects https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633 *NOTE: From my experience, also I had a website that I ran under preffered domain HTTP://yoursitesname.com without the www. and page rank was 2. When I restructured my site settings under http://WWW.yoursitesname.com with the WWW. I instantly had page rank of zero. I took weeks before I got PR 2 again. Google sees those as two different sites. Crazyyyyyy!! You can change that under Google Webmaster tools and WordPress General settings. When building a site do not put all your focus on page rank or backlinks. Place your focus on QUALITY CONTENT. Using appropriate content writing and proper meta data is one thing you have control of. When I started doing that the proper way, my search results stated to move from page 48 to between pages 1 to 3. I used Yoast SEO plugin to help me and now I learned how to do it without it if I needed to. Below is a screen shot of what that plugin looks like on one of my sites. All those green dots are a plus. Otherwise they would be red or orange. Lastly: I will provide more information later on why my preference is to start a local directory instead of a national first. Nothing is wrong with a national or even international directory. In my opinion it comes down to more marketing, branding, and having a catchy domain name. Also if you are operating the site yourself, instead of having people working for you, it is more work for you. I have a full-time job, family, and work on a few of my own websites. That's why I like this GeoCraft theme because once I get it working properly it would likely run itself. Anyways, I will give you more input on this soon. Edwin
Hello Krish, At your earliest convenience, please look over my updated support need and advise on solution. Thanks, -Edwin
Hi Edwin, Thank you for all these informations, it is very clear, rich and it will help me a lot. Can you please put all these informations (copy and paste) in a new thread that youcan call for exemple 'If it can help you' ...... I'm sure that many other people would be interested. waiting for the next step ! thanks !
