We Had One Business Address and Google Saw Five

Quick answer: Google’s index is serving five different versions of our business at the same time, and the wider web has us at six different addresses and four different opening weeks — while our own site alone tells three different stories about when we started. Every one of those five versions is us. We published all of them. Google is not showing our business someone else’s information. It is showing our business every version of itself it has ever published.

Last week we wrote about a speed number that was true for exactly one day. This week we found something worse — and we did not change anything this week.

We changed our own address, and the index never forgot

Last week we replaced a street address with a PO Box. Then, at 03:52 UTC on Monday morning, we changed the number on that box. The two files that print our address and phone into every page footer — gwd-nap-block.php and gorden-jsonld.php — were modified at 03:52:08 UTC. We checked the server timestamps this morning.

How a site-side change becomes an index-side split

A crawler reads your page. It sees a footer with an address, a phone number and an opening week, and stores that string against your URL. You edit the footer. The crawler does not run again immediately — sometimes not for days, sometimes not for weeks. Until it does, the index still holds the string it read last time.

The page is not the problem. The page was correct the whole time. What you have is two contracts: the one written in your visible copy, and the one in the index. A crawler that finds a different business identity than the one it just read cannot reconcile them, so it keeps both — and serves whichever answers the query.

Here is what we measured this morning, and how. We searched Google for our own business name against each address value we have ever published and read the snippets it served back. We also fetched our own live pages and read the NAP values out of the HTML.

State A — the current pages

PO Box 1052, Moses Lake, WA 98837, Mon, Sat & Sun 9:00am-5:00pm. This is what the live site says right now, and it is what we want it to say.

We fetched 36 of our own live pages this morning and read the NAP values out of the HTML. Thirty-five carry PO Box 1052. Exactly one — Monday’s newsletter, which quotes the old states on purpose — carried a stale value, and that is a quotation, not an address we publish. Nothing else on the live site says PO Box 1050, 223 W 3rd Ave, 523 S Division St, or any address we have retired.

The site converged. The index did not.

State B — our own abandoned digit

PO Box 1050, Moses Lake, WA 98837, Mon, Sat & Sun 9:00am-5:00pm. The same week, one number different. This state did not exist a week ago. It exists because we carried it for three days and Google’s crawler caught us during those three days.

This is the uncomfortable one, because it is the failure mode nobody warns you about. It is not a stale value someone else holds about us. It is a value we published, then retracted, and never told the index about. The crawler did its job perfectly: it read a footer that was true at 03:52 that morning and kept it. The only wrong step was ours.

And it will sit there. State B will not decay on its own. A recrawl has to happen after a change, and only then does the newer version start replacing the older one. Until both the address and the hours have been final for a full crawl window, the index can serve the version you published on Wednesday while your live page shows Thursday’s.

State C — the old street address and a weekday-only week

223 W 3rd Ave, Moses Lake, WA 98837, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:00pm. The pre-PO-Box footer. Google is still serving it on our testimonials, ecommerce, website-maintenance, logo-and-branding, SEO-services and Google-Business-Profile pages — pages it has never seen in their current form, because the crawler that cached that footer never came back.

And the week is wrong too. The live footer says we are open Monday, Saturday and Sunday; this cached footer says Monday to Friday. A customer who reads it and calls on a Saturday reaches a closed door on a day we work hardest.

State D — the legacy contact page

gordenwebdesign@gmail.com, Monday-Friday 9:00 AM-5:00 PM Pacific, Saturday-Sunday: Closed, and a copyright line that still says Powered by Astra WordPress Theme. That last detail is the tell: this is the site from before we rebuilt it, still served as the canonical answer for our contact page.

It tells people we are closed on the exact two days we work hardest, and hands them a Gmail address that no longer reaches a monitored inbox.

State E — a version of us that does not exist anymore

This is the one we did not expect, and it is why the count is five today instead of the four we published on Monday. For the no-trailing-slash URLs /about and /portfolio, Google’s index is still serving a completely different business: “Gorden Web Design is a small business web design agency based in Moses Lake, Washington,” with “All-in-One CRM & Marketing for Small Business,” a “$2.99/mo” hosting price, a “Privacy Policy | Gorden” footer, and a portfolio page promising “3x lead increase in 60 days.”

Read that again. It is a different company — a generic agency selling CRM and cheap hosting, not a one-person studio selling websites and computer repair. The live pages now redirect to the modern versions, but what the index serves is a full business identity we used to publish, and it is still answering for our name.

Why the count went up when we changed nothing

On Monday we told you our address was in four different states. This morning it is five, and the reason is the interesting one: we did not change a single NAP value this week. The index simply rotated and served us another copy of ourselves we had forgotten we published.

That is worth sitting with, because it changes what the number means. Our address is in five different states at once, and the states are not going away because we tidy up — they are going away one crawl window at a time.

So the count is not a measure of how messy you are. It measures how many versions of you are still live somewhere. Every change adds one. Every recrawl that lands can add another. You cannot fix it by being tidy, because tidiness is not what the index measures — it measures the distance between your newest version and your oldest one.

Our own homepage shows three of them at once. Across three searches this morning, Google’s index served our homepage with the current box address, the old box number, and the street address. Three addresses, one URL, all at the same time.

Six street addresses. PO Box 1052 (us, and Facebook agrees). PO Box 1050 (our own prior value, still in the index). PO Box 562 in Soap Lake on a directory we have never heard of. 223 W 3rd Ave (the old one, still in the index). 523 S Division St on our LinkedIn company page, the Chamber of Commerce listing and a reviews directory. And 617 S Balsam Apt.1 — an apartment number — on a business badge that lists our phone right next to it.

Three towns. Moses Lake, Soap Lake and Quincy. We are a one-person studio with a PO Box in one of them, and a LinkedIn page that says we have “an office in Quincy.” One directory puts us in Quincy with Soap Lake’s ZIP code.

One phone number — and it is ours. 509-230-4576, the only number appearing anywhere with our name on it. We chased a second one this morning and it belongs to somebody else: a property in Moses Lake that lists 509-765-1955. A number attached to the wrong listing is how a business ends up calling the wrong office at 9 AM on a Monday. Ours is clean — the one thing on this list we got right by accident.

Five email addresses. douglas@ (the live one). webmaster@ on Facebook. doug@ on our own llms-full.txt. douglas.gorden@ on a third-party contact database. And gordenwebdesign@gmail.com as the legacy contact.

Three founding years — all of them on our own property. 2003 — our own about page and our own bio page both say we have run since 2003. 2005 — our own LinkedIn profile says “I started it in 2005.” 2014 — our own schema says foundingDate: 2014, and our own homepage says “since 2014.” Three years, every one on our own property. The same LinkedIn page lists 21 employees. There is one of us, and he is listed with an office in a town we never had one in.

Four different opening weeks. We publish Mon, Sat & Sun 9:00am-5:00pm in the footer. Our own bio page’s body says Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:00pm — on the same page, in the same footer block. The cached street-address footer says Mon-Fri. The legacy contact page says Mon-Fri with Sat-Sun Closed. The reviews directory says Mon-Fri Closed, Sat-Sun 10AM-7PM. A customer who reads the wrong one reaches a closed door on a Saturday.

The one-line mechanism

Here is the whole lesson, in one line: 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 than the one it just read cannot reconcile them. It does not know PO Box 1050 and PO Box 1052 are the same studio, and it does not know 223 W 3rd Ave is a place we used to work from. It has five documents and no idea which is current.

For a business with one address and one phone number, that is a five-way split for free. You did not need a competitor, a typo, or a bad directory listing. You needed a footer.

What one answer set would fix

Here is the unglamorous part, and the part that actually fixes it. Five values, four decisions — because the box digit and the opening week travel together as one choice:

One box digit and one opening week. One phone number. One founding year. One email address.

Get those four answers right and every remaining directory is a mechanical edit — a form submission, a support ticket, a profile update, a phone call. The phone number is already settled. Every other surface is a copy-paste once we know what to paste — all of them wasted effort while that value is still a guess.

And we are not going to publish a table of our own failures without saying which one was the truth. The site has converged on 1052 — but convergence is not confirmation. 1052 is what we were already publishing, so our pages agreeing proves only that we are self-consistent, not right. There is still a live candidate in Soap Lake, and the founding year and opening week are genuinely undecided. Those answers are not ours to guess at.

What we still do not know

Which box is the box. Whether the studio started in 2003, 2005 or 2014. Whether we are closed on weekends or open on them. Whether that apartment number on a directory badge should be published at all.

What we do know is the shape of the problem, and the shape is worse than the numbers. It is not that we are scattered across a dozen directories. It is that one routine edit to a footer we do not think of as content produced five different businesses in one index — and this week, when we changed nothing, it produced another version we had forgotten we published.

Frequently asked questions

👉 Last week’s piece

That is last week’s piece — 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