I got in touch with a local tradie last week. Not for work. Just to tell him something was broken.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s got an online footprint most local tradies would be jealous of. The kind of reviews you can\u2019t buy or fake, the kind that take years of quality jobs to earn. So when I searched his business name plus Bairnsdale, I expected his website to be sitting right there at the top. <\/p>\n
Instead, nothing. <\/p>\n
Not page two, not page ten. <\/p>\n
Google had zero pages of his site listed. <\/p>\n
Not one.<\/p>\n
He hadn\u2019t done anything wrong. Hadn\u2019t been slack, hadn\u2019t ignored his website, hadn\u2019t upset the internet gods. Somewhere back when the site was built, someone ticked a box. <\/p>\n
It might have been labelled \u201cdiscourage search engines\u201d or \u201chide from search\u201d. Sounds sensible if you don\u2019t know what it does. Feels like a privacy setting, something careful, something safe.<\/p>\n
What it actually does is switch on a line of code that tells Google: don\u2019t show this page to anyone, ever. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s called a noindex tag. Once it\u2019s there, your site can be the best looking, best reviewed, best built site in East Gippsland, and Google will carry on like it doesn\u2019t exist. <\/p>\n
His reviews were doing all the work. His website wasn\u2019t doing any of it.<\/p>\n
This happens more than you\u2019d think, and not just to tradies. <\/p>\n
Cafes, motels, anyone whose site was built a few years back and handed over without a proper check. It\u2019s usually left over from testing. The setting gets flicked on so search engines don\u2019t list a half-finished job, then never flicked back off before the site goes live. Nobody notices, because the site still works fine if you type the address straight in. It just never turns up when someone searches for you.<\/p>\n
The fix is one tick box, in the same settings panel where it got switched on. <\/p>\n
No rebuild, no new site, no invoice with a number on it that makes your eyes water.<\/p>\n
Tonight, on your phone, over dinner, search your own business name. If your website turns up, good, go back to whatever you were doing. If it doesn\u2019t, and it\u2019s your Facebook page and your Google reviews doing all the heavy lifting while your actual website sits invisible behind them, don\u2019t panic and don\u2019t let anyone talk you into a whole new site. <\/p>\n
Ask whoever built it one question: is there a noindex tag switched on anywhere. Nine times out of ten that\u2019s the whole problem, and it\u2019s a five minute fix, not a five thousand dollar one.<\/p>\n
The hard part is never fixing it. It\u2019s knowing it\u2019s there at all.<\/p>\n
Matt Rowlands runs yourmateagency.com.au, helping regional businesses get found online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I got in touch with a local tradie last week. Not for work. Just to tell him something…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-846977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}