I ran a diagnostic across thirty-one websites this week — every property I manage, every client site, every internal project. I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I was checking sitemaps, indexing status, and structured data across the whole portfolio, because Google had started sending “new reasons prevent” notifications and I wanted to know which sites they were about.
Most of them were clean. But one had a problem that had been sitting there for months, invisible to everyone, doing quiet damage the whole time.
The Wrong Address
A client’s website was live and working. The pages loaded. The contact form worked. The phone number was right. If you visited the site, you’d see a professional local business and you’d have no reason to think anything was wrong.
But in the source code — the part you never see unless you right-click and choose “View Page Source” — there was a single line telling Google: the real version of this page lives at a completely different domain.
That domain didn’t resolve to anything. It was a leftover from an earlier plan. But the canonical tag was pointing there on every page of the site, and Google was following the instruction.
A canonical tag is a quiet instruction to Google: “If you find this page at more than one address, this is the real one.” When it points to the wrong place, Google doesn’t argue. It just stops trusting the address it can actually see.
The fix took twelve seconds. One line changed, one build, one deploy. The site was live and correct within minutes. But the damage had been accumulating invisibly for as long as that line had been there.
What a Sweep Finds
That wasn’t the only issue. Across thirty-one sites:
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Two sites had no sitemap submitted to Google. Google was finding their pages by crawling links, not by reading a map. That’s like opening a shop and hoping customers find you by wandering past, instead of putting yourself on Google Maps.
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A third site had a broken sitemap — a leftover from an old website that no longer existed. Google was trying to read it every few weeks, failing, and making a note that something was wrong.
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One site’s sitemap included pages that were deliberately hidden from search. The pages were booking forms — they shouldn’t rank. But the sitemap was saying “index these,” while the pages themselves were saying “don’t index me.” Google sees the contradiction and flags it.
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A Google Ads account was double-counting every form submission. Two conversion actions, both enabled, both firing on the same event. The dashboard said the cost per lead was twenty-seven pounds. The real number was fifty-five. Every optimisation decision based on that number was built on a lie. I’ve written about this before — the gap between marketing that looks like it’s working and marketing that actually is. Most of the time, the problem isn’t the strategy. It’s the measurement.
None of these would be visible to you. None of them cause error messages. None of them make the site look broken. They just sit there, quietly, costing you traffic and money and trust.
The Gap Between “It’s Live” and “It’s Working”
I built something this week that I should have built months ago: a post-deployment verification check. Five seconds after a site goes live, it checks the homepage, reads the canonical tag, tests the sitemap pages, and confirms nothing is broken.
It’s the kind of thing that sounds obvious. But the gap between pressing “deploy” and knowing the deployment actually worked is where problems live. The site looks fine when you check it in your browser. The deployment dashboard says “success.” But the canonical tag is wrong, or the sitemap is missing, or the SSL certificate hasn’t provisioned, and you don’t notice until the traffic drops and you start asking why.
The uncomfortable truth
Your website probably has at least one issue like this right now. Not a broken page. Not a missing image. Something structural — something in the code that a human wouldn’t see but a search engine reads every time it visits. The kind of thing that only surfaces when someone systematically checks, not when someone casually browses.
What This Means for You
If you have a website and nobody has run a technical audit in the last six months, there’s almost certainly something sitting in your source code that’s working against you. It might explain why your site gets visitors but not enquiries — or why a page that should rank simply doesn’t. A canonical tag pointing to the wrong place. A sitemap that includes pages it shouldn’t. A tracking setup that’s counting the same action twice.
These aren’t hypothetical. These are the things I found this week, across sites I actively manage. If they can happen under my watch, they can happen on yours.
The difference is whether someone is checking.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. If you’d like me to run the same sweep on your site — sitemaps, canonical tags, indexing status, structured data — I’m happy to do it. No charge, no obligation. Just reply to this email and I’ll send you what I find. The check takes less than five minutes, and the things it catches are the things you’d never know to look for yourself.
