Introduction
I want to write this time about the way the Rolfing website has been rebuilt.
This piece was written in June 2024. I have added to it what I wrote the following month, about changing the domain name, and put the two together. Both are part of the same story — how this site was built, and how it has been reshaped since.
The Site Goes Up — December 2015
I opened my practice in Shibuya in June 2015, offering Rolfing sessions, and began working for myself. Feeling the need for a website in order to find clients, I asked two people for help: Mr Fujii, who had built an earlier personal site of mine about the kaō — the stylised signature used in place of a seal in Japan — and Yoshitaka Komuro (in Japanese), who runs Knowledge Commons (in Japanese).
The people I had in mind at the time were in their thirties, taking yoga or Pilates or some other bodywork into their daily lives and so already attentive to the body. I thought that at that age, someone who felt their world widen through Rolfing would be able to put the experience into words for others.
To handle smartphone users, the site was built to switch between desktop and mobile layouts. I registered the domain zero.hidefumiotsuka.com through Onamae.com, a Japanese registrar, and took a rented server — currently Xserver, also Japanese. The site went live around December 2015.
People found their way to it through Google searches, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and a range of clients came.
Keeping Up with Changes to Google Search
Over nine years of working for myself, one thing I have kept an eye on is where the site appears in Google searches. With Google Search Console it is possible to check whether a page comes up high for a given search term, so I try to work the relevant words into the articles. Nearly all of this is in Japanese, since that is the language most of my clients search in.
The difficult part is that Google’s procedures and rules change abruptly and often.
During the pandemic, from January 2020 to May 2022, I wrote about the coronavirus and about vaccines — I had spent time in an immunology laboratory during my doctorate, so it was familiar ground. Google then changed its rules so that medical institutions were shown first for health-related searches, and for a while the Rolfing site became hard to find.
So I built a separate site for the medical material, along with announcements for my lectures and seminars: Mind and Bodywork Lab, from January 2021, on its own domain, mind-bodywork-lab.com. That site is in Japanese only.
The Rolfing Site Slips Down the Results
In the second half of 2022 I found that searching for Rolfing brought the site up well down the list. The cause was that I had moved every article from the Rolfing site over to Mind and Bodywork Lab. The Rolfing material was gone, and so nothing was there to be found.
I tried three things:
1. Move the Rolfing-related articles back from Mind and Bodywork Lab to the Rolfing site
2. Register with Google Business
3. Make the Rolfing site load faster
The first two brought the site back up the results. As for the third, I learned what was wrong through Google’s PageSpeed Insights — it seems Google ranks slow-loading sites lower.
For the third, then, I asked Tomoki Kirigishi (in Japanese), the digital designer who looks after the site and who lives in Hokkaido, how the loading speed might be improved. In the end we rebuilt it on a new WordPress theme, Snow Monkey (in Japanese).
What Changed
The ZERO logo, which had sat in the centre, moved to the left. On the right there are now five links, including the one for how a session runs.
The thumbnails on the articles show properly now, and I think the text reads more easily too.
On a phone, the menu now appears on the left, and a search field has been added, which makes the articles easier to find.
What I would point to is the Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO scores in PageSpeed Insights. All are above ninety now, which shows the improvement. Unfortunately I forgot to save the earlier figures, so I cannot show them here, but they were far below these.
From zero to rolfing-zero
One day, during a meeting with Mr Kirigishi about the site, we noticed that the sites appearing at the top of the results had rolfing in the domain name. So from 23 July 2024 we changed zero.hidefumiotsuka.com to rolfing-zero.hidefumiotsuka.com.
From now on the address of the site is rolfing-zero.hidefumiotsuka.com. Whether it makes any difference to the search results, I will watch and see.
Next I would like to turn to the English version of the site, which I have left alone for some time, and talk with Mr Kirigishi about what might be done to make it easier to reach.
Conclusion
This piece has covered the rebuilding of the Rolfing website and the change of domain name, along with why those steps were taken.
Note, September 2026
At the end of this piece I wrote that I wanted to turn next to the English version of the site, which had been left alone for some time.
Two years later, I did. But once I began, it was not only the English version that needed work. It became a matter of reading through the articles one by one, in Japanese as well.
What I was looking at when I wrote this was loading speed and the look of the pages — where the logo sat, how the thumbnails came out, the order of the menu on a phone. All of that concerns the container. How many articles were inside it, and what each of them said, I had not counted.
Now I am reading them one at a time. Some to keep, some not to keep, and some to be edited together into one. Sorting them that way, I am preparing a new site.
This piece is one of them. The article I wrote in July 2024 about the change of domain name has been folded into it.
The English version you are reading was written in that same work, in September 2026. Until then, this piece existed only in Japanese.
Putting the container in order and counting what is inside it turned out to be two different pieces of work. At the time, I thought the first would be enough.