Having rebuilt the site, we set up Google Search Console — Google’s free tool for seeing how a site is treated in search.
The setup itself took about thirty minutes. But along the way we found several things more important than the setup, so this is mostly about those.
Until now we could see nothing at all
With Search Console you can see:
- which search terms caused our pages to appear
- how many of those turned into clicks
- roughly what position we appeared at
- whether there are pages Google cannot read
Which means that without it, you know none of these things. You finish with “we made a website” and have no way to tell whether it is working. Rebuilding the site and then repeating that would be pointless.
Where we got stuck
There are two ways to register: cover the whole domain, or cover one specific URL prefix. We chose the first, because it takes www and non-www, http and https, all together.
Choosing that means the only way to prove ownership is to add one line of text to the DNS — the address book that tells the internet where a domain lives. You paste in a verification code that Google gives you.
We added it in the Xserver control panel and pressed “Verify.”
Ownership could not be verified The verification token was not found in the domain’s TXT record.
We had written it in, and it said it was not there.
So we asked the servers one by one
DNS does not run on a single machine. With Xserver, the same content is copied to three servers. So we asked each of the three directly.
ns1 : not there
ns2 : not there
ns3 : there ✓The copy simply had not finished. Google happened to ask a server that had not received it yet.
Asking repeatedly, the answers wobbled:
ns1 : 0 times out of 6
ns2 : 3 times out of 6
ns3 : 1 time out of 6Behind each apparent server there are several more, and only some of them had the new content. What we had written was correct; from the outside it just looked like “present” and “absent” mixed together.
We waited an hour, pressed again, and it went through without fuss.
We are glad we did not panic and rewrite the value, or switch to another method. The error screen suggests “try adding a different TXT record,” but adding more when the correct one is already there only makes things worse.
Finding 1: the previous person’s records were still there
Opening the sitemaps screen, we found this:
https://oes.co.jp/sitemap.xml submitted 2023/06/17
https://oes.co.jp/sitemap/ submitted 2023/06/15Someone submitted these in June 2023 — work done on our behalf back when the old site existed.
The past search data, however, could not be carried over. The property itself was gone; only the sitemap submissions survive, because those are recorded against the site rather than the property.
Neither URL exists any more — the new site organises its URLs differently. We deleted the old entries and submitted the new one.
Finding 2: for two and a half years, the internet thought we were in Shibuya
This was the big one.
Search for our company name on Google and the AI summary said:
OS Co., Ltd., located in Shibuya, Tokyo, is a company handling interior work and building renovation in general.
We are in Okudo, Katsushika. The Shibuya office no longer exists.
The National Tax Agency’s corporate number database made it plain:
2022-07-08 registered Shibuya 1-15-12, Shibuya-ku
2024-01-30 address changed → Okudo 4-25-4, Katsushika-kuWe moved at the end of January 2024 — more than two and a half years ago.
The register was updated. But Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and iTownpage all still said Shibuya. The AI summary is assembled from listings like those, which is why it described us as a Shibuya company.
Changing the register does not change your listings. Obvious in hindsight; we had not thought about it.
Google Maps had two entries, Shibuya and Okudo. We will close Shibuya and put Okudo in order.
Finding 3: our own site had the wrong address too
We are in no position to lecture anyone.
This site said:
Okudo 4-25-4, Katsushika-ku — Route Storage 6The register says:
Okudo 4-25-4, Katsushika-ku — RAISE6The building name is different. Post arrives either way, since the street number is right, but to Google these are two different strings.
Google decides whether two listings are the same company by how closely the name, address and phone number match. Setting out to delete our own outdated Shibuya listing while our own address was inconsistent gives it nothing to work with.
We changed it to RAISE6, as registered — on the site, in the footer, in the privacy policy, and in the machine-readable data.
What actually matters, for a contractor
Having worked through all of it, the order became clear.
First: Google Business Profile (the map). A management company searching “Katsushika restoration work” arrives via the map. That matters more directly than anything inside the site. And it is free.
Second: making the listings agree. Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, iTownpage. If these disagree, the first item’s effect is diluted.
Third: Search Console. It measures; it does not raise rankings. But without it you cannot tell whether the first two are working either.
Fourth: the site itself. Structured data, sitemap, page speed. That was done when we built it — and because it was done, we can say there is little left to gain there.
Doing this in reverse, endlessly adjusting the site, is the biggest waste of effort.
Next
- close the Shibuya entry on Google Maps, tidy up Okudo
- correct the address on iTownpage and Yahoo! Maps
- in a week, check Search Console for 404s on old URLs and add redirects where they matter
Data takes a few days to appear. Tomorrow it will still be blank. Once real search terms start showing up, we will write again — with actual figures rather than guesses.
In this series
- The phone was the only way in
- Building it alongside an AI
- Cut, cut, and cut again
- What is still unfinished
- On a phone, it was a mess
- For two and a half years, the internet thought we were in Shibuya (this post)
- On an iPad, this time it was the “steps”