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.
Every month I open up the excellent Integrity app on my MacBook.
It crawls my main, work-related website at billbennett.co.nz looking for broken links. Every month there are a dozen or so new broken links. That is, the links that my website points to are no longer there.
This month there were eight new broken links. There are 1250 pages on the site and more than 4000 links. In round numbers, about two to three percent of links from my site disappear every year.
Three or four times as many links move to a different URL, sometimes many more have a change of address. This is annoying, but it is fixable.
The dead URLs are more of a problem. Much of the time all I can do is remove the link from my pages and, perhaps, indicate that there was a link, but the page at the other end has since vapourised. Sometimes I can point to the page at the internet archive.
At the moment a few hundred of the 4000 or so outgoing links on my site point to the Internet Archive. It can be slow and difficult to reach, but it is an excellent resource. When I’m feelingn flush, I donate a few dollars to keep it going.
Sometimes pages disappear for good reasons. The company or publication is no longer in business so there’s no-one to pay the hosting bills. Often, it’s just an annoying business practice of purging old pages more or less for the sake of it. Contrary to popular wisdom, purging old pages doesn’t tend to help with search engine optimisation in general.
There are those site owners who prefer to wipe or rewrite history. Whatever.
What is clear is thsat the number of linkable pages is in decline. At one point my site linked to more than twice as many external pages. That’s dropped over time and I appear to be removing links faster than I add new ones.
Conversation:
“Tell me somethihng few people know about you”.
“I am New Zealand’s leading vampire hunter”.
“But New Zealand doesn’t have any vampires”.
“I’m very good at it”.
Had a roll mop herring for breakfast. My wife thinks I’m odd. but to me this is breakfast of the gods… (most likely the Norse gods).
It’s not normally a wrench when a review period comes to an end and I pack the hardware to send back. But I’m going to miss the 16 inch MacBook Pro. It’s big enough for productivity, small enough to carry about. For me it hits the sweet spot.
Was on RNZ Nine to Noon this morning talking about why making tech giants pay media companies is unlikely to save news operations at places like NewsHub, TVNZ or anywhere else.
There’s no direct link yet, but you can find it on this page:
My grandmother’s name was Edith, but on Sundays it was Mary.
I never knew if that was some kind of in-joke that my grandparents had or some weird hangover from Edwardian London.
Had a press release today about the fancy communications technology being used on the driverless trains that will run on the Western Sydney Metro which made me realisejust how far behind the public transport eight ball we are in Auckland.
There are pages on my web site that Google Search console still marks as 404 pages more than 15 years after they ceased to exist.
My plan is to wrap up my limited company and switch to working as a sole trader by the end of this tax year, but the amount of loose ends that still need to be tidied up feels overwhelming. That’s ironic, because reason to switch was all about making life simpler.
Chelsea play Liverpool in the Carabano Cup Final early on Monday morning New Zealand time.
The game isn’t shown on Sky Sport. The NZ rights belong to BeIn sports.
Last year my Sky subscription included Bein. This year it doesn’t.
A year’s subscription to Bein is NZ$150, that’s a lot for one game.. There is a $15 monthly option, which I was mulling over. But when I went to the Bein site, there is a one week free trial.
Bingo.
Iām no longer the only family member withh a regular writing gig:
Went to a company website to see its annual result. Clicked on the link, which took me to Microsoft Teams… strange, but OK, the annual result could be a video presentation and it’s possible the company is clueless enough to use Teams for that job.
Anyway Teams crashed rebooting my Mac.
This is what using computers and the internet used to be like all the time. Haven’t seen anything like this in a least a decade.
Mastodon and BlueSky go a long way to replacing Twitter. For now it looks like journalists would be wise to maintain accounts on both . If they get their interoperability act together it will solve one problem.
The one remaining problem is discoverability or search. Finding stuff is hard.
Have done the preparation for tomorrow’s technology slot on RNZ Nine to Noon.
If you are in New Zealand you can listen on the radio at 11am… but it’ll be posted online later in the day.
If I buy something then get bombarded by pleading messages for positive online reviews then I’m unlikely to ever use (or trust) that company again. If someone has to beg for positive online reviews, that’s because they know they do not deserve them.
Things have reached the point where it feels like it is easier to find and watch Australian cricket than the Black Caps.
I won’t be watching tonight’s Wolves - Chelsea football match live, but will probably see it before Christmas morning breakfast kicks off.
The newsletter sent out on Friday December 23 has, so far, had 3 per cent fewer openings than the average.
Have spent the morning writing to various websites, especially online forums, requesting they do a better job with site accessibility. In particular there are sites which override browser accessibility controls… that’s not good enough.
For a while I was concerned at the drop in page read numbers when I switched from WordPress’s internal analytics to Ghost and Matomo. Especially so after I stopped engaging on Twitter.
Then I realised:
a) Matomo doesn’t include stats from people with cookies turned off or who otherwise request privacy and
b) Ghost automatically generates AMP pages for people viewing my site on a small screen.
Given that before the switch more than half my traffic was from mobiles, that means what looks like a 60 per cent drop in traffic is probably close to business as usual.
Not that it matters… I don’t sell ads or other information, I’m more interested to know what does or does not get read.
My all time favourite piece of technology is the Bialetti stove top espresso pot. No question.
After that it is all a blur although for a long time the iPod was up there near the top.