Overnight Google sent an email:
Search Console has identified that some pages on your site are not being indexed due to the following new reason:
Blocked due to access forbidden (403)
The URL in question is:
It popped up for the first time today.
Which may seem a plausible error, but it really isn’t.
The URL is for an internal WordPress plug-in. In other words a URL that Google should never have crawled anyway. But that’s only the first odd thing.
It’s been more than three years since I switched from WordPress to Ghost. Moreover, if I ever did install the ie-sitemode plug-in, it would have only been for a day or two, it was never on my standard list of plug-ins and does not show up in any of the copious back-ups I kept of the WordPress site.
Google Search Console shows a list of pages that refer to the URL. With the exception of the home URL billbennett.co.nz none of these still exist. Indeed none of them have existed for over a decade now.
So GSC has found an ‘error’ in a URL that should not have been indexed in the first place, only fleetingly existed and hasn’t been around for a decade.
Meanwhile popular, current, active pages remain unlisted.
Google Search is screwed.