A welding shop nobody could reach, and what was actually wrong
The intermittent SSL error had nothing to do with his certificate. Here is what a 36-day rebuild found, measured with the same tool before and after.
Visit ihweld.comThe client
Iron Horse Welding & Field Services, 5024 Broadway Blvd SE, Albuquerque. Owner Fred Dyson. Heavy equipment repair, field service, rebuilds and structural welding, on site anywhere in New Mexico or in the shop. Open since March 1999.
We took over management of the site from a previous web company on August 1, 2026, month to month since.
What he thought the problem was
An intermittent SSL error. He had lived with it for months and been told it was his certificate.
What it actually was
His domain was being intercepted by a carrier's security filter and redirected to a warning page. Customers on that carrier could not reach him at all.
It presented as a browser problem, which is why it went unsolved. It hit Brave and Firefox but not Chrome, because Chrome's encrypted DNS hid the hostname from the filter. It was not a Google penalty: Search Console's Security Issues report was clean the entire time. And it was not his certificate.
We identified the filter and filed through the carrier's own help flow on August 7. On August 11 their policy team closed the case in writing:
Confirmed that the reported site was blocked by Advanced Security. We're working to remove the block.
Verified on August 13 from a connection on that carrier, the same connection that could not reach the site from July until that date: ten consecutive clean HTTPS loads, certificate verified every time, no interception in any response.
Time to first byte
1.4 to 1.7 s
recorded through the filter
Time to first byte
0.33 to 0.53 s
measured after the block cleared
The old figure had been taken through the filter, so it was never a reading of his server at all.
The rebuild
Launched August 7. Static, no CMS. Same instrument before and after.
| PageSpeed | August 3, old site | August 31, new site |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile | 52 | 86 |
| Desktop | 68 | 89 |
Separately, on September 14, local Lighthouse 13.4.1 under fixed conditions returned mobile 100, 100, 100 and desktop 100, with a largest contentful paint of 1.0 to 1.2 seconds on a 387 KiB page. That is a different tool under controlled conditions, so it is reported on its own rather than stacked on the table above.
Cumulative Layout Shift went from 0.135 on mobile and 0.186 on desktop on August 31, both over Google's 0.1 line, to 0.031 on September 14. It is not zero and we say so on his dashboard.
Making him an entity instead of a page
Diagnosed August 14: the site asserted facts about itself and linked to nothing. One LocalBusiness block repeated on every page. An assistant reading it had a single, unverifiable source.
Shipped August 27:
One outbound reference became six
sameAs now points at the Google listing by its permanent ID, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube, so a machine has six places to check the same facts.
A Person record for the owner
Fred Dyson as founder and employee, linked back to the business. In our study of 556 local business sites, 94.2% carried no Person record at all.
Hours that match the listing exactly
openingHoursSpecification at 7:00 to 16:00, Monday to Friday, with weekends stated closed. Two AI assistants had been repeating a competitor's 8 to 5.
Typed services, coordinates, a founding date
geo coordinates, a hasOfferCatalog in place of a flat list of topic strings, and foundingDate, all on the same record.
All four major AI crawlers receive the full page on a direct fetch, byte for byte identical to a browser, with no JavaScript required. Most sites fail silently here. His does not. We describe this as work done, not as an AI result: the recommendation re-measure has not run yet.
The proof that was already public
Pulled October 15, 2026 from USAspending.gov, the federal government's own spending record, which anybody can search:
- Federal contracts, 2009 to 2023
- 15
- Total paid
- $469,271.70
- Agencies
- Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Indian Affairs, US Army, US Fish and Wildlife Service
- Largest single award
- $164,835.25, engine rebuild, 2016
The rest is undercarriage rebuilds on D6, D7 and D8 dozers, brake work on a 621B scraper, motor grader repairs, cutting edges, and heavy equipment repair at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.
Two things follow from it.
It dates the business from outside.
His logo reads EST 1999 and his old Field Service page claimed over 30 years of experience. Both could not be true, and the correction we shipped on August 14 rested on his own answer. The federal entity record gives a founding date of March 15, 1999, which is the same fact from a source that is not him.
And it is the work nobody can find him for.
Across the third quarter of 2026, measured in Search Console on September 30, 258 non-branded queries reached the site. Rebuilds produced zero queries and zero impressions. Ground engaging tools produced five impressions and no clicks. Eighty-four percent of the non-brand impressions were general welding, much of it the wrong intent. The jobs a federal agency paid six figures for are the jobs his search presence does not represent at all, and that gap is the case for the work rather than a result of it.
Search, 36 days either side of launch
| Search Console | Jul 2 to Aug 6 | Aug 7 to Sep 11 |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks | 125 | 131 |
| Impressions | 1,890 | 2,220 |
| Pages receiving impressions | 8 | 10 |
| Distinct queries | 159 | 187 |
| Average position | 11.2 | 11.3 |
Six more visits on a base this small is not a result and we do not present it as one. The honest signal is the coverage: 28 more distinct queries and two more pages earning impressions, which is the site becoming eligible for more searches rather than winning the ones it already had.
September then fell. On matched 28-day windows, clicks went from 114 to 88 while average position improved from 11.1 to 10.1. A small site moves with the season and with what people search for, and one month in either direction is not a trend.
His Google rating moved from 4.4 to 4.5 on its own, before he had sent a single review request.
What is still open
His second domain, ironhorsewelding.net, got worse rather than better. Since early October every path on it, apex and www, returns a redirect into an unrelated company's server, which then answers with an error. Anyone who finds him on a directory that still carries the old address lands on a stranger's error page. Most of his off-site citations still carry it, including an unclaimed review profile that also republishes the wrong 8 to 5 hours, and so does his own federal entity record.
The fix is at the registrar, not at the DNS host. The domain sits in a registrar account he is not on. He is working on being added, and the day that happens it is twenty minutes of work. We do not pretend any of this is finished.
For months the answer was "it's an SSL thing." It was a carrier filter, and no amount of work on the certificate would ever have found it. Most of what looks like a website problem is a measurement problem first.
Living with a problem nobody can explain?
We measure first and fix second, with the same instrument before and after. Book a free 15-minute call and bring the thing everyone says is "just a browser issue."