Gorden Web Design Newsletter – November 2, 2026: Our Address Is in Four Different States at Once

Monday’s newsletter, delivered here. Our email provider is still suspended, so we are publishing this issue on the site instead of sending it to your inbox. The issue itself is unchanged.

Hi there,

Last week we wrote about a speed number that was true for exactly one day. This week we went looking for another one, and found something worse: our own address is in four different states at once.

Here is what happened. We changed our published address to a PO Box four days ago, and last night we changed the number on it. We checked this morning whether either change had actually landed anywhere.

The live pages are all correct. Every one of them. We checked twelve of them this morning, including the two that answer the questions a new customer actually asks — “how long does it take to build a website” and “do I need a website if my business is on Facebook.” All twelve say PO Box 1052. Not one of them mentions the old street address.

Google has four different answers.

The newest version of our pages is the correct one. The second version is the box number we were publishing until last night — a digit we changed ourselves, now cached on the pages Google crawled while it was live. The third is the old street address and a weekday-only week, and it is still being served on pages Google has never seen in their current form, which means the index is handing out a footer we deleted days ago. The fourth is older still: a version of our contact page that says gordenwebdesign@gmail.com and tells people we are closed on Saturday and Sunday — the exact opposite of the week we publish.

And that is only our own pages. In the wider web, our business has three PO Boxes, four towns, three phone numbers, five email addresses, and four different founding years across nineteen directories. One of those PO Boxes is in a different town. One of those phone numbers is on a site we have never heard of. One of those founding years is 2006.

We are publishing all of it, including which numbers are wrong.

The useful part is not the mistake. It is the mechanism, and it is one line of code long: Google reads your footer. When you edit the address on one page and the hours on another, you have published two businesses. Structured data and visible copy are two different contracts, and a crawler that finds a different business identity on the page than the one it just read has no way to reconcile them.

We are also doing the unglamorous part, which is the part that actually fixes it: one box digit and one opening week, one phone number, one founding year, one email. If we get those four answers right, every remaining directory is a mechanical edit. We are not going to publish a table of our own failures without saying which one was the truth.

👉 https://gordenwebdesign.com/your-speed-number-is-lying-to-you/

That is last week’s piece, and it is the same argument one layer up: a number without a method behind it is a decoration. Ours was. So is an address, apparently.

If you want your own numbers read honestly — including when that is unflattering — get in touch, or call 509-230-4576. We run the audit every morning.

— Douglas Gorden Jr
Gorden Web Design, Moses Lake WA