If you ever somehow accidentally delete, mess-up, overwrite, or otherwise jack-up a post or article that you have already published online, there might be a way to get it back.
Of course, the best case scenario is that you have a backup copy saved somewhere. But, sometimes, life doesn’t happen only in the best case. If your offline blog writing software posted over an important blog post that is no longer saved on your hard drive, or if you were just trying something new out in WordPress and accidentally tweaked that high-ranking pillar article you wrote and then WordPress auto-saved right over the top of the original, then you might be up a well-known tributary without the proper means of motivation.
Fortunately, if you don’t panic, there might be a way to get it back.
If your online article or post has been indexed by Google, there might be a cached version of it. Finding out isn’t hard. Just Google the title of your article. The closer to the exact title, the better, but if you can get close the “site:” operator should get you the rest of the way.
When you find your article listed in the search results, click the “cached” link. Hopefully, good old Google will bring up your old article in all of its former glory. Copy and Paste that text right away so that you don’t lose anything else.
Tip: The fewer keywords you use when you search to find your article, the less highlighting there will be. So, if you know this is your only article to ever mention aardvarks, try searching for “aardvarks site:arcticllama.com” (with your domain name, of course) and that way you’ll only have to deal with un-highlighting the word aardvarks.
This exact trick saved my bacon earlier this morning.
Thanks Google.