I have a website that I built for my songwriting and music a few years ago. It has been working well, but I have been getting emails from Google saying that the website has 4xx issues on some pages.

I am not computer technical enough to know what that means. I ignore the emails for a while because I don’t know how to fix what they are talking about.

I do some searching online and found some good YouTube videos on how to do it yourself. But I just don’t want to take time to learn that information.

What To Do ?

I heard about hiring freelancers thru certain websites. The freelancers are from many countries of the world.

I came across a good article on these types of companies titled

8 Best FiveRR Alternatives

From this article, I got a look at freelancer land, and I decided to check out Upwork dot com. So many freelancers to choose from, with prices from $5.00 an hour and up.

One of my first thoughts was, I don’t know how much website work a freelancer can do in an hour, and I really don’t know how big a job it is to fix the issues on my website.

So I posted a Job on Upwork, and invited a couple of freelancers to bid on the job. I got some responses I liked and hired the one that I thought was the most knowledgeable.

My freelancer was from Pakistan and charged $8.00 an hour. He looked at my website and I provided the info that Google said I needed to fix, and he quoted 5 to 10 hours to do the work, and I did a contract with him.

Slick Payment Operation

How Upwork works, is that they ask for your credit card information to pay the freelancer. Once I did that and entered an hourly contract with a freelancer, Upwork pays him at the end of each week, based on the work he has done, and posted to the Upwork website.

First Time Confusion

Being a first time user on the Upwork website, it a bit confusing, but figured the basics out in short order.

There are a few options that can be important depending on the work you need done. There was an option to allow or not allow for “Manual Work”. I did not allow this, as it appears to allow the freelancer to log time not using the website. I later read in a Q & A post, that a freelancer logged a bunch of hours with nothing to show the client as production, and the client had to pay for it.

Good Work

My freelancer went straight to work, after I got him a login to my website. The messaging part of the Upwork website worked well, and was the main communication portal for us.

The freelancer was able to finish the job in 6 hours. I did not realize how many web pages I had, as each of these blog posts is a website page.

He reported back that he completed the work, and it would take a handful of days for the Google bots to re-crawl the website and save the new page information. I did get emails from Google saying they were doing this, so hopefully my website rankings will improve over time.

Problem Solved

I was happy to have this problem off my plate. I was even more happy to have tried out Upwork and hiring someone from across the world to fix my website issue, for a lower price than I would have had to pay in my own country.

I Hired Globally

I wondered what things the freelancer would have spent his earnings on ? I suspect that just like me, he would be buying food, clothing and shelter for his family. And maybe a luxury item or two as well.

The experience triggers some thoughts –

I directly hired someone on the other side of the world.

I directly gave a person on the other side of the world money.

I have helped someone on the other side of the world financially.

And I guess I have directly participated in the global economy by buying services from a seller on the other side of world.

This has been a new experience and if the need arises, I would do it again.