kudzurunner
2204 posts
Jan 06, 2011
5:46 AM
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All:
Google analytics tells me that the second hightest number of hits for HCH is coming from a page with the following url:
http://www.hillcountryharmonica.com/news.html
That page doesn't exist--you get a 404 message if you go to it--and I don't remember creating it. I'd like to track it back to the link that is obviously sending people to it. Can somebody point me towards the page where that URL is linked? Thanks.
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harpdude61
609 posts
Jan 06, 2011
6:47 AM
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Hmmmm...you do have a news and updates section that works fine.
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ncpacemaker
36 posts
Jan 06, 2011
6:51 AM
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There's no link to it on the site itself that I can find. Someone must have created that link and put it on their page somewhere. If you can't find it, why don't you just create the page and add some content to it. It you can't beat it join it.
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Maybe I can't play that good but I'm a lot better than people who can't play at all.
Sincerely,
ncpacemaker
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ncpacemaker
37 posts
Jan 06, 2011
6:56 AM
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Wow that was fast! Typed the address into google and got this thread. Hounds on the trail.
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Maybe I can't play that good but I'm a lot better than people who can't play at all.
Sincerely,
ncpacemaker
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ncpacemaker
38 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:11 AM
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Mr. V's theory sounds plausible Skip, but why would people put in the /news part if they knew the domain name. There must be a link somewhere.
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Maybe I can't play that good but I'm a lot better than people who can't play at all.
Sincerely,
ncpacemaker
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kudzurunner
2205 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:21 AM
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NCPacemaker: You're a genius! That makes a certain kind of twisted sense, doesn't it? Create the page that I can't find, so that I'll be able to find it from then on.
Here's the weird thing: in order for me to be getting Google analytics data from a (nonexistent) news page, I MUST have created it at some point AND put analytics code into it. But I've scoured the pages that come up on the backside of Macwebsitebuilder for the HCH website--including about ten pages from last year that we're not using (artist pages for last year's performers who aren't joining us this year)--and there's no news page there; there's no page anywhere on the site, visible or invisible, that has that URL. It's a phantom page.
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kudzurunner
2206 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:25 AM
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Harpdude:
I think you're referring to this site, aren't you? This site has a news and updates page.
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Andrew
1257 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:25 AM
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It's an interesting problem. I've been scouring the page sources merely out of curiosity. I'm not a web person, so can't offer any real help. Did you create the site from a wizard which might have created a news page as part of a package, then it got deleted?
I guess not, as it got hits. It's weird that an attempt to access a non-existent page is defined as a hit!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2011 7:27 AM
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Honkin On Bobo
553 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:30 AM
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"I MUST have created it at some point AND put analytics code into it."
Not as far fetched as you might think Adam, you've got a TON on your plate at all times it seems. This site, organizing and running HCH, OMB conception development, recording and touring, a professorship in MS..... AND a family (not necessarily in that order of course).
With that much on the plate...I'd be forgetting my name from time to time.
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RyanMortos
933 posts
Jan 06, 2011
7:39 AM
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Adam, believe it or not creating 'oops you stumbled onto a page that you shouldn't have but here's the link to the main page' type webpages (maybe with a picture of a cartoon harmonica that looks lost, lol) is more common than you might believe & this is one of the reasons it is done. I second the notion of creating one if it continues to be a common hit & you want to rectify it.
I did do a number of searches and can say no site explicitly tells anyone to go to that link. If it exists it will be internal, within the code, of some site. I might take a closer look at hillcountryharmonica site after work.
If someone else wants many browsers you can right click the webpage and select 'view page source' or just 'view source', from there you could Ctrl+f to do a search and then look for .com/news on the hill country pages.
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~Ryan
"I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window." - Stephen Wright
Pennsylvania - H.A.R.P. (Harmonica Association 'Round Philly)
Contact:
My youtube account
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tookatooka
2040 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:14 AM
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Just a thought I've played around with Google quite a lot and have a number of sites both on and off Google and use the Google Webmaster tools suite quite a lot too.
Firstly I have found that Google is very difficult to understand. When they tell you something or give you results, they are not cut and dried and can depend on many other parameters which they are not telling you.
It may be that a news page was in existence at some time which coincided with the time that one of Googles Robots (or any other search engines Robots) was crawling your pages to log all the content of your site. This information would then be used to rank your site in order of importance when people were searching for a page with keywords that you may have used.
The visits etc that you gleaned from Analytics, may just be visits from robots crawling your site and they have been sent to the news page because it is still recorded somewhere in the ether and considered to be a legitimate page.
With Google Webmaster Tools, they do say to notify Google when taking a page or site down, also if changing a sites pagename, create what is called a 304 redirect, but only people who know about how Google works really bother to do this.
The 404 page not found notice will eventually disappear but sometimes these things can take weeks, months, up to a year to shake through.
If you use Webmaster Tools, you may get more in depth info if you go to Diagnostics then Crawl errors where any 404's will be listed.
I have 404's on one of my sites where I changed the page names. I know it doesn't exist but somehow hits are recorded on it and I assume it is the robots crawling defunct dead ends still until Google gets tired and simply decides to ignore it once and for all.
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Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2011 10:19 AM
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Rasputin
5 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:39 AM
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Agree with tookatooka. Possibly a spider that's continued its attempts to crawl it.
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Tait Sweigart
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MrVerylongusername
1459 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:42 AM
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Adam,
Google has a number of special searches that help webmasters.
One is "link:" which gives you a list of all sites (as cached by the googlebots) which link to a site.
"link:www.hillcountryharmonica.com" only returns the Olemiss media Highway61 radio site which seems to be down after having been hacked by viagra peddlars - possible culprit maybe? certainly suspicious.
in a day or so I guess MBH will show up on that search now that you have added a link.
I still think you are getting false-positives from the 404 page. Possibly webcrawler as Tooka suggests working on out-of-date database info or maybe a spambot speculatively looking for a news page it can attack.
Did you have a news page last year?
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2011 10:46 AM
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Greg Heumann
969 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:50 AM
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Or, you could just create a news page for HCH, which isn't all that bad an idea, OR..... you could just ignore it.
The web, and certainly Google, works in mysterious ways sometimes. Take it from someone who has been using personal computers since 1976 - sometimes it is best to overcome one's innate desire to find the cause, and simply move on.
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/Greg
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MrVerylongusername
1460 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:59 AM
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LOL!
wise words Greg. I remember pouring through hundreds of lines of code on a TRS-80 to find a mistyped command.
Hours to type it in. hours to debug it: then it turned out the game was crap anyway! anyone remember"Mugwump"?
We're slaves to these boxes: often for no good reason.
I'm off to read a book now (honest)
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ncpacemaker
39 posts
Jan 06, 2011
11:14 AM
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Very interesting. Noticed earlier that whatever non-existent page you navigate to under the HCH domain, it will display the HCH header with the links and all, but only if you attatch the .html extension. Without the .html extension you get a totally different result. This must be a special feature Google offers with their hosting service and it's a pretty good one.
Still the question of how people are landing on the news.html extension remains unanswered. You should re-title this thread "The Missing Link", and of course offer a free face to face lesson for whoever finds it.
:-)
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Maybe I can't play that good but I'm a lot better than people who can't play at all.
Sincerely,
ncpacemaker
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2011 11:18 AM
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tookatooka
2041 posts
Jan 06, 2011
11:24 AM
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MrVLUN. Oh dear, that reminds me of the months I spent learning to use and program with the Z80 Machine Code. What a waste, but I enjoyed it at the time. Must have gicen me the tenacity to learn harp.
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kudzurunner
2213 posts
Jan 06, 2011
3:16 PM
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Here's the solution I've just worked: I created a new page with the URL:
http://www.hillcountryharmonica.com/news.html
and I created it as a redirect page. I then put in the HCH homepage as the page to be redirected to.
Try it out. I don't know if this will solve the problem, but it will make it go away. Those aren't the same thing.
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tookatooka
2042 posts
Jan 06, 2011
3:32 PM
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Works OK my end.
It's always best to take the path of least resistance.
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2011 3:39 PM
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Greg Heumann
971 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:01 PM
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@tookatooka - wow - Z80 machine code? And I thought I was the only one. I didn't do much of it, but my first job out of college was working for North Star Computers - (we're talking 1980 here) - and I did international sales and support for our (insert fanfare here) Z80-based computers.
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/Greg
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Joe_L
965 posts
Jan 06, 2011
10:13 PM
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@Greg - you're a good friend, but damn, you're old!
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The Blues Photo Gallery
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tookatooka
2043 posts
Jan 07, 2011
4:55 AM
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@Greg. Yes, programming in the lowest level hexadecimal was fun until you found a problem but we needed to code it that way so the program took advantage of every clock cycle. Then assembly language came along and made things easier.
But, the one I enjoyed using the most was a language called Forth. That was an excellent higher level language. You had to use reverse polish notation for any math but in the end you ended up with just a single word. That one word called up other words and so on and so the program ran. Oh! those were the days.
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Andrew
1258 posts
Jan 07, 2011
5:21 AM
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I've never programmed in hex, but in 1978 I did some octal and PDP11 assembly language. Hated it.
I had no idea low-level languages were still used until I did a course in graph and network theory last year and we went through all that crap about stacks and lists yet again and I asked, why bother!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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MrVerylongusername
1463 posts
Jan 07, 2011
6:58 AM
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Hey Tooka, did you ever have a Jupiter Ace?
It was like a ZX Spectrum, but used Forth. Probably a collectors item now. I had one. Forth was cool and comparable in speed to machine code (fast - for the 80s at least!)
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MrVerylongusername
1464 posts
Jan 07, 2011
7:59 AM
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The Ace was compatible with a lot of the ZX-81 stuff I had, including the "wobble-of-doom" 16K ram pack. 16K!!! frightening how things have changed isn't it?
Yes I got quite into Forth, but it's all leaked out of my sponge brain now (I was in my early teens and soon discovered other distractions!)
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tookatooka
2045 posts
Jan 07, 2011
8:14 AM
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"16K!!! frightening how things have changed isn't it?" Yes I remember having some very reasonable chess software with up to 10 levels, and even a helicopter flight simulator which fit into 48K. You really had to keep your code down in size in those days because memory was expensive. Even an empty document today can be massive in memory size terms.
Although the hardware has become very sophisticated, it's a pity that the uses it is put to hasn't changed.
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