Legacy pages and redirects can leave ‘ghost URLs’ in the index. Use Search Console to see what Google really fetches.
Most websites have a hidden archive. Old HTML pages, forgotten PDFs, test folders, legacy redirects, stray copies of the home page from a redesign six years ago. Nobody links to them. Nobody can find them from the menu. We assume they don’t matter, but they can start causing problems – usually in ways that are hard to spot.
A classic example is an old HTTP version of the home page hanging around. In normal browsing, the server quietly redirects us to the current HTTPS home page. We never see the old file.
But search engines do not experience our site like we do. Google might still have the old HTTP URL in its index. It might crawl it, follow the redirect, and decide everything is okay. Or it might crawl it, treat it as a distinct URL, and end up with a messier picture of what the ‘canonical‘ home page really is.
This can show up as duplicate indexing, old site icons, unexpected sitelinks or odd URLs that do not match the site we believe we have. Even worse, old files rarely come alone. They bring old internal links. So what do we do if we believe Google is seeing these ghosts?
Search Console has a surprisingly practical tool for this: URL Inspection. If we inspect a URL and then run a Live Test, we can see what Google retrieves and how it renders the page right now. That matters because the index view can be stale. The live view shows what the crawler actually got today.
If the live test shows that Google still retrieves an unexpected asset, or that the redirect chain is messy, we have found a real issue. If it shows that Google lands cleanly on the correct page, we can at least stop guessing.