The image kindly made available at GB fans forum
The Story continues …
This is episode 2 of our Google education effort. Have you read episode 1, Global Ghosts Afterlife? Therein we claimed and explained that our site essentially didn’t have 404 not found errors. To get the SEO right we are using Rank Math SEO, and with the advent of the Global Ghosts, it was time to turn on a module for which we thought we had no use, the 404 monitor.
Parapsychology and the Image Proxy
How do ghosts multiply? Surely we had laid the global ghosts and the google ghosts revealed in the Google Search Console by redirection to the afterlife? So our 404 monitor should be clean apart from the haphazard? But, Oh dear, no! So many entries and with common characteristics. So let’s look at this one ,,,
| URI | wp-content/imagescaler/ad3e154bee03f2b5acf54109eafa19cb.jpg |
| User-Agent | Firefox 11.0 | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy) |
Parapsychology as a science
Things we noticed and investigated:
- many of the references are to folder wp-content and the file extension is jpg, so these are images.
- the user agent refers to (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy). What’s that?
- can we actually return the image from the Internet Archive? (see episode 1).
Extraterrestrial: Google Phone Home
So the User Agent says: (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy) and if you Google search “ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy” one of the results at the time of writing is Dealing with false opens in Gmail It seems you would have to be an email marketing expert to make much sense of the findings in that article. But one thing is clear, this is the published Google Image Proxy. BUT, sometimes, the image proxy is looking in the wrong place for the image and receiving a 404 not found response.
Looking in the right place, here is the image you would see based on the URI and using a little bit of work with the WaybackMachine.
What we intend people to see for the time being, is this:-
In other words, a direction to this post which gives guidance as to where you might find the original image of the cover of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
Past Lives and the Paranormal
So we know that authors-books had a past life and the image of the cover of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is an artifact of that past life. These observations emerge in the context of our difficulties with Google search, where we’ve gone from hero to zero, we believe and intend to prove, through no fault of ours (we’re still on page 1 in Bing search and DuckDuckGo, etc) And while Google features large in our observations because of the image proxy and wide adoption of Gmail, this is in fact another global problem. So authors-books would like to suggest a global solution.
The Global Ghost Code
Wikipedia has a list of HTTP status codes. The 4xx rage are client errors. Some people have suggested in cases like that above, the site should return 410, sometimes described as content deleted. But that’s not true. On the current incarnation of the website it never existed.
Would love to have come up with a clever suggestion for the code, as in 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons, a reference to the novel Fahrenheit 451. Ideas please. But in the meantime, what about:
452 Property of a Previous Owner of the Domain Name
This request probably relates to a page or image from a website established by a previous owner of the domain name. It has never been available on the website of the present owner of the domain name. The page or image may be available at the Internet Archive on the WaybackMachine.
452 – a solution for generations to come
Alphabet, please get behind this idea. When Google Image Proxy or any other system receives a 452 response there’s constructive action to be taken. Perhaps automatically trying the Internet Archive? Whatever, the world has been given a more meaningful response.
Much more to come …
This is the end of episode 2 of our Google Education series. So much more to say, so episodes 3, 4, … coming. And we know we’re doing our SEO well because we’re on top of page 1 in Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. with searches where we’re nowhere in the Google results!
The Previous and Next Episode
Update 2nd October 2025.
Hurray, we’re now found in Google searches. We changed nothing, but Google Search has caught up.
The previous episode Global Ghosts Afterlife published 16th October 2024.
The next episode Google Books Blind Alley published 18th October 2025.