it's webmasterin' thyme
Today, I received an email from one of the design companies for which I occasionally do contract work. They told me one of their old clients wanted to remove their staging website altogether. The email was from their "webmaster" asking for help removing the site from search engines.
This got me thinking - if you call yourself a webmaster, shouldn't you know how to do basic tasks like removing a site from search indexes? It seemed like a pretty straightforward problem to me. All it would take is setting up a redirect or adding canonical tags to tell search engines the staging site content has moved. Or the webmaster could just log into Google Search Console and use the URL removal tool.
This gets me thinking about how many "webmasters" or other IT roles there must be out there who don't truly have the skills for the work. Meanwhile, there are probably talented people seeking jobs who don't get opportunities simply because they lack connections or experience marketing themselves.
In the end, I did provide some quick guidance to help resolve the issue.