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I made a spreadsheet, a part of which uses the IMPORTHTML function to get data from this webpage. For the first couple of weeks that it ran, it worked pretty great, getting all the data from the table as needed. I use the function 3 times, to get the results from the 3 different tables on the page.

What I've written is: =IMPORTHTML("http://www.parkrun.org.uk/results/juniorclubs/?eventname=norwich-juniors","table", 3) in a cell.

It worked fine for a couple of weeks, but now just says that it can't fetch the URL. It returns the same error in a completely blank spreadsheet. What's up with this - have I made a really obvious mistake, or did Google change the way that the function should be used? Could something else affect this?

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    Google hasn't changed anything. That pattern still works on other sites. This might be related stackoverflow.com/questions/32133716/…
    – Tom Woodward
    Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 20:35
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    Neither HTTP or HTTPS working for me on 5/15/2017. The former version stopped working last week. Very frustrating!
    – David
    Commented May 15, 2017 at 23:10
  • @David did you ever fix this? I'm having exactly the same problem now
    – Charlie Harding
    Commented Dec 12, 2018 at 21:37

2 Answers 2

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Oddly enough - in this exact situation - I played around with the page, a couple functions, variations, but the change that actually pulled in the data was simply changing the url from http to https..

see below image for live content successfully pulled

enter image description here

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  • Just dropping by to upvote this and mention that switching to HTTPS also fixed my Yahoo Finance synchronization issue. Many thanks! If someone else out there uses the Investment Moats portfolio tracker, I hope Google directed you to this page :)
    – Laur
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 22:29
  • Worked for me...
    – neo269
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 10:43
  • Note that this Google Groups thread suggests the opposite (i.e., dropping the 's'). In my case, neither works...
    – Jess Riedel
    Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 13:45
  • What worked for me (luckily, this time) was dropping the 's' to 'http://'. It looks like google caches http requests, and if one fails, it caches the fail too. So if you want to get it to immediately retry, you need to actually change the url.
    – fuzzyTew
    Commented Mar 1, 2019 at 11:15
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    Getting NA today with the code. Is something blocking the Google service?
    – hhh
    Commented Apr 15, 2019 at 15:05
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"Could not fetch URL" basically means that Google is not able to get the content of the URL. It's be very likely that this is caused by "something" on the side of the specified URL

  1. Google use the same group o IP addresses for many services and users. If the service is popular among Google users it could block Google IP addresses temporally or permanently. If his is happening, there is nothing that could be done on a Google Sheets formula.
  2. Changing from http to https or viceversa. If this is happening, just edit the URL accordingly
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