I use the Google Search Console on this blog, because it’s self hosted and I want to make sure it gets indexed correctly. Last night I got an alert (or rather I saw the mail – I don’t log into gmail all that often) that said that one of my pages wasn’t being indexed any more because it came up as 404 status (with is httpd code for “not found”).
Now the url tells you pretty much everything you need to know, that it was published on the 28th of April 2025 and it was titled “The Rest of the Time At Cowan’s Gap”. I distinctly remember writing that post. But it’s not there on my blog. I have two posts from that time about our trip to Cowan’s Gap and the first couple of days there, so it stands to reason that there needed to be a post about the rest of it. But it’s not there. I thought maybe it got deleted in the last update of WordPress which happened a few days ago, so I had a look in the Wayback Machine and it’s not there, not last week and not in 2025. It’s not unpublished or in the drafts folder either on my site or on the WordPress app which I often use to compose blog posts off-line and upload them when I’m on-line.
I can’t even find what’s linking to it. Google Search Console says it’s being linked to from my own blog, but it doesn’t specify which page of the blog, and the blog’s own search isn’t helping.
So there’s actually a couple of mysteries:
- Did I write it or did I just imagine it?
- If I wrote it, where is it?
- And why did Google only decide this week that it’s missing?