My pages no longer respond to their URL

  • Unknown's avatar
    jaygreenstein · Member ·

    It looks like a WordPress software bug, or a malicious attack on the site, has bitten me. I’d go to support directly, but the email address and the page where we would normally request help appears to have been disabled.

    This afternoon, one of my pages, titled: A Surfeit of Dreams, has stopped being findable via search engines. This link SHOULD work, but doesn’t: http://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/a-surfeit-of-dreams/

    Now, one-by-one, the links to all my novels have vanished.

    The page I provided the link to, above, has been working without issue, since 2013. But now, my links to it, and the rest of my novels, links that worked yesterday, have stopped. I’ve changed nothing, and all pages are set to public, and, look good. Since it’s spreading to other pages, the problem appears to be at the WordPress end—possibly some sort of hack of the site. If so, I’m not the only one.

    Since I can’t contact WordPress directly, is there anyone reading this who can get them to fix it?

    All my books have a list of the other novels, with links to their WordPress page that no longer work.

    And as an unrelated observation, it would really be a help to users if there was an easy way to learn the URL of a given page for public access to that page, so it can be used in links. We can’t use the one assigned to the user, because that requires a login. So, it appears that we have to find it via a search engine. And with that not working…

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    staartmees · Member ·

    The wordpress.com platform certainly hasn’t been hacked. Your site is up and running and all links work as expected. You find some solutions at https://wordpress.com/support/browser-issues/

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    This afternoon, one of my pages, titled: A Surfeit of Dreams, has stopped being findable via search engines. This link SHOULD work, but doesn’t: http://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/a-surfeit-of-dreams/

    If the page no longer comes up in online searches, it’s because the search engine has removed it from, or deprioritised it in their search index. The most common reason this would happen is because the search engine considers the content to be dated: this particular page was published in 2013, for example, and there’s very little recent content on your site overall, so I can understand that it won’t rank highly in search engines at this point.

    Search engines give priority to current content, so to keep your site high in search results you need to publish regularly, and it also helps if other people are linking to your content from their own sites. This is just one of several factors that can impact how search engines index and rank your site, though, and it’s normal for content to rise and fall in search result pages over time.

    But the link itself is working fine for me. It takes me directly to that page on your site. I also checked several links in your site menu, in the sidebar, and in the content of that page itself, and they all work for me.

    So I don’t see anything broken on your site, and there’s definitely not any malware or hacking going on on your site.

    Please try the browser troubleshooting steps @staartmees suggested above, and let us know if that makes no difference for you.

    And as an unrelated observation, it would really be a help to users if there was an easy way to learn the URL of a given page for public access to that page, so it can be used in links.

    You can find the URL for a post or page by either viewing it on the site itself, where you can then copy it from the browser address bar. Or you can find it under the Permalinks section in the editor when you create/edit a post or page:

    https://d.pr/i/dxNsiS

  • Unknown's avatar
    jaygreenstein · Member ·

    • You can find the URL for a post or page by either viewing it on the site itself, where you can then copy it from the browser address bar.

    That gives you the user’s creation/edit page URL. To reach that one you need to log on as that specific user.

    The Permalink entry is is exactly what I was looking for, though. Thank you! They really need to place the “View Page” entry at the top, along with “Update, and Preview, where it can be seen, not as an afterthought to a function whose meaning may be obscure to most users.

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