One setting was hiding an entire website from Google.

01What noindex does

There is a single instruction you can put on a web page that says to search engines, politely but absolutely, "do not put this in your results". It is called noindex, and it exists for good reasons. A checkout confirmation page or a private document has no business in Google.

While a site is being built, most platforms switch it on across the whole site so an unfinished thing does not appear in public. That is sensible. The problem is that switching it off again is a checkbox somebody has to remember, and it is invisible to everyone who is not looking for it.

When it is left on, nothing looks wrong. The site loads. It works on a phone. Every page is perfect. It is not in the index, so no amount of good work on it will ever produce a single visitor from search.

02How to check yours in a minute

Open your homepage, right click anywhere that is not a picture and choose View Page Source. You will get a wall of code, which is fine because you are only looking for one word.

Press control and F, or command and F on a Mac, and search for "noindex". If it does not appear, you are clear. If it does, that is your answer and you have just found the most expensive checkbox in your business.

Do it on a couple of other pages too, because it can be set page by page as well as site wide.

03The other place to look

There is a second file, at yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt, which is a plain text instruction to search engine crawlers. Type that address into your browser and you will see it.

If it contains the two lines "User-agent: *" followed by "Disallow: /", that is telling every crawler to stay off the entire site. Same effect, different mechanism.

This one is rarer but it happens, usually when a site has been moved between hosts and an old configuration came along with it.

04What it cost, in this case

This was an established business with a genuinely good site and a real reputation locally. Their content was better than most of their competitors. None of it was visible.

They had been told at one point that search was not working for their industry, and they had believed it, because from where they were sitting the evidence supported it. They had stopped trying.

That is the part that stayed with me. The technical fault was trivial. The damage was that it had quietly taught somebody their market did not exist online.

05Afterwards

Removing it is not instant. Google has to come back, crawl the pages and decide where they belong, and that takes weeks rather than days. You can speed it up by submitting the site in Search Console and asking for indexing on your most important pages.

If somebody built your site and you have never seen it in a Google result for your own business name, check this before you spend money on anything else. It is four minutes and it is the first thing I look at.