We took our own address off our website

We put our registered office on our about page because the plan said to. Company details, verbatim: entity, ACN, ABN, address, email, phone. It went into the visible table, and because the structured data has to agree with the page, it went in there too.

Then we looked at it and asked who it was for. The answer was nobody. Not one customer has ever needed to know which unit we work from, and the people who do need it, the tax office and the regulator, already have it.

So we took it off. That part took ten minutes. Finding every other place it had got to took the rest of the afternoon.

What does a customer actually need to know?

Where you are, roughly, and whether you cover them. For us that is Brisbane, and we work with businesses across Australia. Those two facts do the entire job that a street address was pretending to do.

A customer wants to know you are real, near enough to be useful, and reachable. A suburb and a phone number carry that. A unit number carries nothing extra.

Does hiding it hurt my Google ranking?

This is the objection we expected, and the honest answer is no, provided you set it up properly. Google has a category for exactly this, called a service-area business. You verify your address with Google, they confirm you are where you say you are, and the listing shows the area you serve instead of the street.

Tradespeople have been doing this for years. If you run a business from your kitchen table, you are the intended user of that feature.

What does hurt you is inconsistency. If your website says one thing, your Google listing says another and an old directory entry says a third, that is a real problem and a common one. Pick one form of your location and use it everywhere, down to whether you write Queensland or QLD.

Where does an address hide once you have published it?

This is the part we underestimated. Taking it off the page is the easy half.

The same details go into the structured data, which is a machine readable summary sitting in every page’s code that describes your business to search engines. A visitor cannot see it. We had put the street and the postcode in there, and it would have stayed there long after we had tidied the visible page.

We dropped the postcode as well, which was not obvious. A postcode plus a suburb narrows things back down to roughly the address you were trying not to publish, so leaving it in would have half undone the decision.

Then there were the other copies. The plain text summary we publish for AI assistants. The design files. The README. Forty of them across nineteen files, in the end, and none of them anywhere a visitor would look.

How do you stop it coming back?

We wrote a check that fails our build if the address turns up anywhere in the finished website, including places a person would never think to look, like the JavaScript files. It fails loudly and stops the site publishing.

That sounds like overkill for one address. It is not, and the reason is the way these decisions rot. The document that told us to publish it in the first place is still on file. Somebody working from it in six months, quite reasonably, would put it straight back. A note in a folder does not stop that. A build that refuses to finish does.

Ours nearly failed for real. One of the scripts we send to the browser was pulling in the file that holds the address. The thing we had just taken off every page would have gone out inside a JavaScript bundle instead.

What we do now

The about page lists the entity, the ACN, the ABN, the location as Brisbane, Queensland, the service area as Australia, the email and the phone. That is the whole of it, and it is more useful to a customer than the version with the street in it.

Worth saying plainly: we are not telling you to hide your address. If you have a shop, a workshop or a clinic, publish it in large type, because people need to walk in the door. This is for the large number of businesses that quietly put a home address on the internet because a form asked for one.

Have a look at your own site and your Google listing. If your street address is on there, decide whether it is doing a job. If it is, leave it. If it is not, it is easier to remove today than after it has spread.