If you’re using the Flexibility2 theme, you may have noticed that the search box doesn’t really work. If you haven’t tried it, do that now. Are you getting the results you would expect? Does it return different results each time you search? If so, here’s how you can fix it.
It took me a bit to come up with this solution. I installed some different search enhancement plugins and nothing worked. I compared to some of my other wordpress installations and noticed that they all had a search.php where the Flexibility2 theme only had the searchform.php file.
To test, I uploaded the search.php from the default theme and it worked. It looked bad because the css was different but the results were good so I went into my theme editor (wordpress admin > Appearance > Editor) and copied everything in the archive.php file and pasted it over everything in the default search.php file I had just uploaded.
Voila… the results were perfect as well as the design.
So, to recap. If you are having poor search results (as in non-existant) when searching your site using the search box, just do the following.
1. Upload the search.php file from the default theme into your Flexibility2 theme folder.
2. Copy the contents of your Flexibility2 themes archive.php and paste over everything in the new search.php file you just uploaded. (do this in your admin>Appearance>Editor tool).
That’s it!
I only tried this with the Flexibility2 theme but I would expect that similar results could be obtained in any theme where the search.php file was missing by following the same steps above.
Take Care,
Gail
Comments
Thanks, Gail, great post! I got a little confused around the ‘how to count the cloaked links’ section but I think that was more due to the time (3am) than anything else. I have tried your methods again this morning though and they work perfectly.
I’m using it on an unindexed landing page, driving traffic via PPC, and promoting a clickbank product. So far so good…
Glad you were able to get it going! Your problem with understanding probably had less to do with it being 3am when you were reading and more to do with it being 3am when I wrote it. 
Hi Gail,
I tried your cloak link for clickbank, and it worked perfectly on the first time. the same cloak link can be used for commission junction as well?. I looked at your cloak link generator, not sure I understood it well, to give it a try.
thanks for your help Gail.
Warm regrds
Charles.
Hi Charles,
Glad you were able to use the clickbank code easily. I don’t use CJ much and haven’t tried to see if I could cloak the links. For the misc items I do promote, I use my own url shrinker. You can see it at https://wahguide.com/url , you are free to use that one if you like or you can install the script and use on your own site. You can download it at https://wahguide.com/freebies/url-shortner.zip , I also put a link to it in the freebies section. It’s easy to install and the readme file is included. If you have any problems with it, just let me know. On a side note, I think it would not be difficult to do Ebay links and I’ll look at that sometime soon.
Take care,
Gail
Hi Gail,
Thank you so much for the reply. the url shrinker seems attractive. No Gail I did not use it yet, though just tested it. Just saw your reply, thought I will say thanks. will catch up with you once I try it out. Thanks again Gail.
Warm Regards
Charles.
hi nice post pretty useful I got this to work, although it would be nice to know how to also include .html extension on the end instead of just http://yoursite.com/amz/B0011ZCDKS. I’m sure this can be all done in .htaccess file just not sure I’m a little bit of a green horn lol!
Hi Sheldon,
It’s no problem to add the .html to the end.
Replace
RewriteRule ^(.*)
with
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html
Then your link would look like
http://yoursite.com/amz/B0011ZCDKS.html
This works with clickbank as well. And you can change the html to any file extension you want. It is basically just ignored anyway.
hi,dear
thanks for useful tips you let me to know more about .htaccess.
how i can indexing my newly created sites using .htaccess in search engines like google?
thanks alot for article.
Whoa… this site is pretty awesome 
your layout is really well designed, and your blogs are (judging from what i’ve read) very interesting. heehee… consider yourself favorited. 
Hello, I enjoy reading through your blog, I wanted to leave a little comment to support you and wish you a good continuation. Wishing you the better of luck for all your blogging efforts.
Excellent post! I’ve switched over one of my dynamic websites to a static .html website and was looking for a more efficient way to cloak my Amazon links since I couldn’t use the features of plugins.
Thanks for sharing!
Amazon Links idea great. I’m going to try it with my Amazon affiliate sites. thank you.
