Credit: Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash
The Story so far
The advice for some time had been, that to achieve our goal, we needed the right brand. As a micro startup, to set things in motion, we’d gone with our business name Data Stream World and we took the domain name datastream.world. Yes that’s a new top-level domain (TLD .world). And we said the brand was Author Direct Bookshop, but, it never did seem right.
Then when Facebook become Meta, Google become Alphabet and Twitter become X, we wondered why can’t Data Stream World become Author’s Books? We were delighted to find that the domain name authors-books.com was available. Wow! An actual .com that’s completely the brand. New logo, move the site to the new domain name and we’re away. Or so we thought.
With our old domain name, if you searched in Google for a book title on our site we were always number 1 or 2 in the search results. Yes, we’d got the SEO right using Rank Math. Then why with the new domain name and an otherwise identical site are we nowhere? Literally nowhere! This post is just one part of the story of our effort to find the answer.
Google Ghosts
Our site doesn’t have 404s. Yes, well if you key the URL ‘authors-books.com/nonsense’ you will get a 404 response. That’s a real 404. But Google Search Console should not be getting 404 responses. It never did with the original domain name of datastream.world. And we regularly run a link checker. So, what’s going on?
Why are we receiving emails from Google Search Console telling us there are reasons pages are not being indexed? Really didn’t happen before. Better take a look. Horror!
There’s this bunch of URLs (see image below captioned ‘Google Ghosts Cellar URLs labelled vintage authors-books.com’) that have never been on our site. We’ve never heard of them!
And into the bargain the URLs are HTTP. Our sites, datastream.world and authors-books.com have always been HTTPS. We’re talking about current professional websites after all.
Internet Archive
Ah! So perhaps this domain name belonged to someone else before? But, why on earth has Google Search Console associated that data with our Google account? After all, we’ve had to jump through hoops proving we own the domain.
Now experience tells us, we’re seldom alone with a problem. So, we go ahead with a (yes) Google search “404 previous owner URL”. And there they all are, people experiencing the same issue. At least one of the entries refers to the Wayback Machine.
So, we pop one of the URL’s into the Internet Archive and there it is.
Now some of the “experts” advising worried site owners give advice that Google Search Console has a very busy bot and it may not be that speedy in forgetting old memories and getting up to date. Heavens above! This capture was made only once in 2010CE. Apparently, the site became unreachable not long after.
Current XML Sitemap
Our site has an excellent XML site map generated by Rank Math. We don’t think we ever explicitly submitted to Google Search Console a site map with our original domain name datastream.world. Perhaps, Google Search Console found it, or Rank Math submitted it, we’re not sure, but the end result was top rankings for the titles on our site.
However, some of the “expert” advice talked about submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console, so we looked to do that. Unbelievable, there was a site map that never was on our site, submitted over ten years ago with all these non-existent HTTP URLs! By what misguided mechanism did it become associated with our site?
We instructed Google Search Console to drop this ghost, hoping things would improve. But no. It seems these ghost URLs are very difficult to lay. How ironic that one of the titles was “Dark Life by Kat Falls”. Time for ghost busting! So here we are, we now have redirections from those URLs to this page.
Global Ghosts and Google Ghosts
Global Ghosts are references to no longer existing pages. The page might not exist for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that the domain name ownership is not renewed and has reverted to an available name with the domain registrar. That’s an artefact of the domain name system.
Google Ghosts as found in the Google Search Console look like cobwebs that need to be swept away. Is there not an opportunity when the proof of ownership of the domain name takes place to ask whether any data held by Google Search Console is still relevant to the website of the new domain owner? Then, at that time, Google Search Console has a chance to sweep the cellar clean if that’s what’s desirable.
Backlinks
In the hope of mutual benefit and the possible continuing power of backlinks we’ll happily list your site here if you too have suffered from the afterlife of Google Ghosts. Please send an email subject “Google Ghosts Afterlife backlink” to webmaster@authors-books.com. Please include the URL where we can view your link to this post. Also a few words you’d like to go with our link to you and the URL you’d like us to reference.
The Next Episode
This is the end of episode 1 of our Google Education series. Episode 2 ‘Google Ghosts Trap‘ published March 2025.