I got in touch with a local tradie last week. Not for work. Just to tell him something was broken.
He’s got an online footprint most local tradies would be jealous of. The kind of reviews you can’t 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. Instead, nothing. Not page two, not page ten. Google had zero pages of his site listed. Not one.
He hadn’t done anything wrong. Hadn’t been slack, hadn’t ignored his website, hadn’t upset the internet gods. Somewhere back when the site was built, someone ticked a box. It might have been labelled “discourage search engines” or “hide from search”. Sounds sensible if you don’t know what it does. Feels like a privacy setting, something careful, something safe.
What it actually does is switch on a line of code that tells Google: don’t show this page to anyone, ever. It’s called a noindex tag. Once it’s there, your site can be the best looking, best reviewed, best built site in East Gippsland, and Google will carry on like it doesn’t exist. His reviews were doing all the work. His website wasn’t doing any of it.
This happens more than you’d think, and not just to tradies. Cafes, motels, anyone whose site was built a few years back and handed over without a proper check. It’s usually left over from testing. The setting gets flicked on so search engines don’t 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.
The fix is one tick box, in the same settings panel where it got switched on. No rebuild, no new site, no invoice with a number on it that makes your eyes water.
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’t, and it’s your Facebook page and your Google reviews doing all the heavy lifting while your actual website sits invisible behind them, don’t panic and don’t let anyone talk you into a whole new site. Ask whoever built it one question: is there a noindex tag switched on anywhere. Nine times out of ten that’s the whole problem, and it’s a five minute fix, not a five thousand dollar one.
The hard part is never fixing it. It’s knowing it’s there at all.
Confused by the tech? That's literally my job.
If any of this left you with questions, ask me. I'll give you a straight answer in plain English.
Ask Matt