This one is a behind-the-scenes lesson, and it applies to just about any Charleston business with a website.
What happened
We work with a dental office whose website looked completely normal. The homepage loaded. The service pages loaded. The contact form worked. If you had clicked around, you would have said everything was fine.
But during one of our regular weekly checks, we looked at the site the way Google does. Google Search Console, a free tool from Google, showed something we didn’t expect: Google’s crawler had been running into hundreds of errors over about two weeks.
The cause was a small piece of code on the site. Every time someone, or Google, followed an old link that was supposed to redirect to a new page, that code was stepping in and returning a blank page with a “503, try again later” error instead of sending them where they needed to go.
Regular visitors rarely hit those old links, so nobody noticed. Google, which visits old links all the time, noticed plenty.
Why it matters
A 503 error tells Google “the server is temporarily unavailable, come back later.” Once in a while, that’s no big deal. But when Google keeps getting that answer, it can’t follow your redirects to the right pages. Over time, that can affect how well those pages show up in search, and any value from old links pointing to your site doesn’t get passed along.
Put simply: the site looked fine to people and looked broken to Google.
How it was fixed
We found the code that was causing the problem and corrected it. Then we made sure each redirect goes straight to the right page in one hop, instead of bouncing through several addresses along the way. We tested the redirects afterward to confirm they were working, and kept an eye on Search Console to make sure the errors stopped.
The lesson: check what Google sees
Most business owners check their website by visiting it. That’s a good habit, but it only shows you one side. Google sees your site differently. It visits pages you’ve forgotten about, follows old links, and reads things that never show up on screen.
Here are a few simple ways to see what Google sees:
- Set up Google Search Console. It’s free. Once it’s connected to your site, it shows pages Google can’t reach, errors it runs into, and which pages are included in search.
- Look at the Pages report. It lists pages that aren’t indexed and why. A sudden jump in errors is worth a closer look.
- Check after any website change. New plugins, theme updates, a redesign or a hosting move are the most common times things break quietly.
- Test a few old links. If you’ve changed page addresses in the past, try the old ones. Do they land on the right new page, quickly and without an error?
Why a weekly check helps
Problems like this don’t announce themselves. Nobody calls to say “your redirects are broken.” The longer they sit, the more Google runs into them. A short, regular look at Search Console is one of the easiest ways to catch issues while they’re still small.
It doesn’t have to take long. Ten minutes a week, or even a few minutes a month, is a lot better than never.
The bigger picture
Your website has two audiences: the people who visit it and the search engines that help those people find you. Both need to have a good experience. When you only check one, it’s easy to miss what’s happening with the other.