Having caught only part of City Council's discussion of the furniture fiasco, I searched Google for Channel 17 to see when I might watch the meeting online. The web address showed the City's website but the display showed something completely different. It had two buttons from Network Solutions enabling one to bid on or renew the domain name.
Public Information Officer Anthony Wilson e-mailed me the city's web address, which remains in operation. However, something changed, given links I posted, just days ago, no longer work. They produce the same Network Solutions image.
I assume most of the links to the City's web site on this blog are now broken.
Update: I removed a statement about the city not paying for their domain and it expiring. In looking at links that no longer work, they have a .org extension. The bad Google links also have a .org extension. Why are these links broken and why do they produce a page that encourages the web owner to renew? Computers are funny things, but fooling Google and a heavy website user in the same day is quite an achievement. I look forward to finding out what changed.
Update 10-26-12: Public Information Officer Anthony Wilson never acknowledged the Google search issue, but Councilman Paul Alexander did. Today, the City's website directed web pages with the dot org extension to the correct page. My links are no longer broken.
Update 4-23-13: The City announced another new web domain, ostensibly to make it easier to find. Given most people use Google or another search engine, this reason seems inadequate/inaccurate. My guess is the city wants the old domain to expire, such that links will break.
3 comments:
According to the whois record
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/sanangelotexas.us
they are good til 2015.
There are a couple of old domain names that were pointing to the cities website. Hope you are using the sanangelotexas.us domain.
Thanks Jim. I don't know if the city is migrating their web site via the Vision Internet contract or if Google is showing old domain names.
Links that worked, like one to the city's purchasing policy, show the odd page, so something's up. Exactly what, remains to be seen.
Actually, it looks like the .org domain finally expired. Google searches for the City of San Angelo give the .org address, as does Bing. Other than breaking my links, the City's website is now harder to find via search engines.
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