On 15 October 2026 Palo removed 4,434 entries from the census that were not the name of one website. From the next analysis on, the number of sites found and the number of dead sites are each about 4,400 lower. Nothing about the South African web changed: these entries were never websites.
What they were
Before October 2026, one of Palo's sources was the certificate transparency logs, the public record of the security certificates that websites use. A certificate lists every name it covers, and sometimes a contact e-mail address. The old discovery code stored some of those lists whole, as a single "domain". The census held entries like these:
| Stored as one domain | What it holds |
|---|---|
ru.ac.za, twice, on two lines |
the same name twice |
[email protected], with two more names on further lines |
an e-mail address and two names |
*.example.co.za |
a wildcard, which covers many names and is not itself a site |
.nisis.gov.za |
a name with a stray leading dot |
Some held a ligature (the single character "fi" in place of "fi") or an invisible zero-width character. That code was replaced in October 2026, and nothing has stored such entries since; the existing ones stayed until now.
How they were counted
An entry holding several names cannot be visited, so Palo recorded most of them as dead.
| Counted as | Entries |
|---|---|
| dead | 4,414 |
| active | 17 |
| blocked | 2 |
| unavailable | 1 |
| total | 4,434 |
The few counted as active or blocked were ones Palo could still reach,
for example an address in the form [email protected], which leads to
example.co.za. In those cases the same site was likely counted twice.
What was done
- The real names were kept. Each entry held one or more real
.zanames, 7,856 in all. 5,956 of them were already in the census under their own name. Of the other 1,900, one was already waiting in the queue and 1,899 were added to it, so Palo will visit them and record each as it finds it. They are mostly the names certificates list, such as mail and autodiscover addresses. - Links were kept where possible. 47 links that pointed at an entry holding a single real name now point at that name.
- The entries were removed, with their scores and other records.
- Palo now accepts only well-formed names. A name in the census is
lower-case letters, digits, hyphens and underscores, in parts separated
by single dots, ending in
.za. The database refuses anything else.
Reading the figures
- Sites found and dead sites drop by about 4,400 at the first analysis after 15 October 2026. About 9% of the sites counted as dead on the front page before the change were these entries. Active sites drop by 17.
- Earlier figures are not revised. The timeline keeps every earlier day as it was counted, so it shows this step.
- Earlier reports keep their figures. The .za web, September 2026 was counted with these entries included. A copy of the census taken on 11 October 2026 held 4,417 such entries counted as dead and 9 as active.