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Google Cache Saves The Day

July 18, 2007 by

I made an amateur web designer mistake today, but luckily Google’s cache was there to bail me out. Somebody alerted me to a spelling error on one of my smaller sites, so I opened it up in my editor to fix it. Some of you know where this is going.

When I opened it up, I opened it live… on the server. When I clicked save, the editor crashed. Bye bye went the page of my website. It just so happens that this was the homepage.

Luckily, I designed the site so that actual content was all in include files – separate from the PHP logic. Heading over to Google I managed to do a search for “cache:www.example.com” and view source to get all my content back.

If it weren’t for Google, I’d have had to wait a few hours until I could get my hands on a backup version of the website’s code.

Thanks Google.

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About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com

Comments

  1. Ryan says
    July 18, 2007 at 1:06 pm

    I guess I should mention that I was doing this update from my laptop… where I didn’t have any backups stored. Had I done this from the office, it wouldn’t have been an issue.