Just bought a totally messed up pr4 site - what on earth do I do with it?

[nparkin0]

Hi all,

I have jsut bought a website (pr4) which is totally and utterly messed up. I used to be a blog by the looks of things but it seems to have bits missing everywhere and doesnt even have a template or anything.

The site is - blog_for_oregon DOT com (take out the underscores and replace DOT with .)

It is supposed to get 350+ uniques per day and I want to know what to do with it. I would like to make it look nice again and have some sort of order but I dont know where to start.

Would I be best installing a blogging script or something similar (suggestions for what to use here would be good) and just spend time copying and pasting all the thousands of posts there is?

If I did do this would it lose its positions in the search engines and affect traffic at all?

Sorry for all the questions but I really dont know what to do with it.

Regards,
Nick.

[w8amoment]

All I can see is the Hosting folders. Didn't you receive the site files?

[nparkin0]

Thats very odd. When I type in the address I can see the index page which has been there for ages.

Try typing 'oregon blog' into google, it should be in 3rd place. Will you let me know what you see then?

I do have the files...all be it incomplete. But I knew they would be anyway.

[w8amoment]

Index of /

cgi-bin

Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8i DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 server at blogfororegon.(changedthis)com Port 80

[nparkin0]

I do not understand.
I have changed the name servers to my own Hosting a few hours ago yet I still see the original homepage albeit a little disjointed both when I type the domain into the address bar and access it through google. I also cannot get my ftp client to access it with my log in details.

Here is a screen shot of what I see each time. - http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5...kdhfjhdksj.jpg

[copper]

It may take more than few hours until name server change reflect on the internet.
Depend on your isp, it may take up to 24 hours or more.

I do not understand.
I have changed the name servers to my own Hosting a few hours ago yet I still see the original homepage albeit a little disjointed both when I type the domain into the address bar and access it through google. I also cannot get my ftp client to access it with my log in details.

Here is a screen shot of what I see each time. - http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5...kdhfjhdksj.jpg

[yru]

That site was using Drupal when it was active.

For some reason, now it is linking to archive.org for all active files in the header code. What were the terms when you bought this site? Were you given all the files?

In the head tag of the code there is "<BASE HREF="http://www.REMOVED-YOUR-OR-BLOG-DOMAIN.com.wstub.archive.org/">"

You may be able to edit the header file and remove the BASE HREF code to restore everything or there could be a simple error with Drupal that would essentially restore the whole blog, if not, you could hire someone to gather all the posts and add them to a new blog and redirect all the old posts URL's with a SEO safe 301 redirect. There are currently 120 pages indexed in Google, I wouldn't want to lose those.

[tekz999]

Park it.

[nparkin0]

Thanks for the advice yru, I will take a look tonight and see if I can fix it. Hopefully it can be restored. When I bought the site I was told there was something wrong with it, I probably should have looked closer but I suppose thats my fault.

I will have a go at fixing it and see what happens.

[draggar]

If it used software like Drupal / Joomla / Wordpress you did set up the database for it and point it to that database - right?

[nparkin0]

Ahh that could be my problem. When I got the files I just uploaded them straight to the public_html file. I will take a look.