Case study · real estate · website health audit
Hager Home Team: From Invisible to Indexed
The Hager Home Team's Colorado real-estate site was failing 6 of 10 website health checks — including a noindex tag that hid it from Google entirely and a split www/non-www domain cutting its SEO authority in half. The RankOps rebuild passes 8 of 10 on staging, reaching 10 of 10 at domain cutover.
Before — production site
6/10 checks passed
thehagerhometeam.com — ⚠ broken
After — optimized rebuild (staging)
8/10 checks passed
→ 10/10 once the domain points here. The 2 remaining checks (domain redirect + robots.txt) only apply to the live domain.
What was broken — and what each failure costs
- Domain redirect missing — www and non-www didn't resolve to the same URL, so Google saw two different sites, splitting SEO authority in half.
- No meta description — Google picked random text for search results; zero control of the first impression.
- Six H1 tags on one page — should be exactly one; six confuses Google about what the page is about.
- Images without alt text — invisible to Google's image indexing and to screen readers.
- A noindex tag blocking Google — the page was telling search engines "don't list me." Delisted, entirely.
- No XML sitemap — new listings and posts might never get indexed at all.
- Open Graph missing — Facebook/LinkedIn shares rendered broken: no image, no description, no clicks.
- robots.txt error — Googlebot couldn't read the crawl rules.
What the rebuild fixed
- Title optimized — "Matthew Hager | Colorado Real Estate": unique, under 60 characters, keyword-rich
- Meta description added — 132 characters with location and service keywords
- Exactly one H1 — "Colorado Real Estate with Matthew Hager"
- All 4 images given alt text; 1,023 words of content (well above the 300-word minimum); 6 internal links
- Contact & about pages surfaced — email, phone, and trust signals visible
- 2 social profiles linked — more entities for Google to connect
The 2 remaining checks (www→non-www redirect and robots.txt) are configured in the build and validate automatically when DNS cuts over — the checker currently hits the old server. This is the diagnostic-to-deployment path the $99 Inspection and The Fix productize.
Questions
What was wrong with the Hager Home Team site?
The production site failed 6 of 10 health checks: www and non-www resolving as two different sites (splitting SEO authority), no meta description, six H1 tags on one page, images without alt text, a noindex tag hiding the page from Google entirely, no XML sitemap, missing Open Graph tags, and a robots.txt error.
What did the optimized rebuild score?
8 of 10 checks passing on the staging build, with the remaining 2 (domain redirect and robots.txt) being domain-dependent — they pass automatically once DNS points the live domain at the rebuilt site, taking it to 10/10.