My client has lost his URL - is there anything he can do to salvage SEO?
-
My new client has had his URL for 8 years and built up good SEO, visitors and links. He has now lost it and the cost of getting it back is prohibitive.
Apart from contacting all the places he is currently getting links from, is there anything he can do to salvage SEO and site visitors? Is there anyway he can get 301s done if he no longer owns the URL?
If he starts again with a new URL, and loads all the new content on it, will submitting a site map help Google understand its not duplicate and all the content is just at a new URL?
He is hoping that contacting Google and explaining will help them "look kindly", but I have never heard anything like this happening!
Any ideas?
Many thanks
-
Thanks everyone - apart from following up on backlinks, will try the GWMT route and hope for the best!
-
Hi Chammy,
With no other information on how he came to "lose" it, I would say his only hope is if he still has access to the Google Web Master Tools account, but he would have to act NOW, in the hope that the new domain owner is slow in getting things organized.
The process:
- Purchase a new domain
- Upload all content and ensure that site is ready to go as soon as new domain resolves
- In Google Webmaster Tools, create a Site account for the new domain & verify it
- In your old Webmaster Tools Site account, notify Google that the site has moved to new domain
- Add a few pages of completely new content to the site on the new domain
- In the Webmaster Tools Site account for the new domain, use "Fetch as Googlebot" to fetch each of the new pages and up to the maximum 50 most important pages in the site. (If a page is successfully fetched with this feature, you can manually add it to the index.)
- Find all existing backlinks possible (using Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, link: search operator in Google, Bing & Yahoo) and contact as many of those webmasters as possible, advise of the domain change and ask them to correct their links.
As Alan pointed out, the only way that this will work for him is if the new domain owner is slow in setting up a GWMT account and he still has access to his existing account, so basically, he needs to act immediately and pray a lot
Incidentally, if he has already missed out on the opportunity to tell Google about the change of domain he should still follow the steps above for the new domain and try to get the links corrected if he can to get some quick traction where possible.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
So he let the domain expire?
You can not contact Google if the domain has expired, all trust will be lost, you can also not 301 re direct a domain you do not physically hold.
What you can try and do is acquire the domain when it comes back onto the market, yet with high competition it may cost a fair amount, especially if the domain is a good generic term & has 8 years age.
-
You mean he has lost his domain name?
He can not 301 a domain he dose not own, he need not worry about duplicate content as the old content will drop out of the index eventualy.
If he still has access to the account in GWMT, he can remove the site, but i would hurry before WMT tries rto validate the site again and finds out it no longer exists
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
4XX client error
I am a bit confused...my recent site crawl told me I had 1 4XX Client error, (high priority). This is the page...
Technical SEO | | sdwellers
http://www.seadwellers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/367679d2+0+277-SD.mp4 This link below is listed as the "linking page"....I guess that the link comes from?
http://www.seadwellers.com/category/dive-travel/ I'm just not getting this...where did the page of the first link above come from...and what is the deal with the catagory/dive-travel/ page? And how do I fix? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated...0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Structuring URL's for better SEO
Hello, We were rolling our fresh urls for our new service website. Currently we have our structure as www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/bangalore We like to have it as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-bangalore Can someone advice us better which one of the above structure would work out better and why? Should this be a focus of attention while going ahead since this is like a search engine platform for patients looking out for actual doctors. Thanks, Aditya
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Can I optimize two different pages with very similar keywords without hurting SEO?
Hi there, I have often heard that you cannot have multiple pages rank for the same keyword. My question here is more about long tail keywords who have the same keyword phrase repeated on different pages. For Example: I have two webpages with different content. I want to have one page (Homepage) rank for the more generic term such as "innovation management" and another supporting page rank for "innovation management software". Will Google see these two different webpages as competing? Should I avoid repeating the more general term in the phrase? Has anyone ever seen your SEO results decline when doing this? I don't believe this is duplicate content since the pages hold completely different copy and assets but I am not sure if the repeating phrase in the title tags will flag anything to the search engines.
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
SEO for Wordpress
I am sure you have been asked this many times... What is the BEST Wordpress Plug-in for SEO - Easy to Title Page, Meta Tags, etc... ?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tab540 -
What are your thoughts on Twylah and SEO?
I recently signed up for Twylah. If you are not familiar with it, Twylah creates a summary of all your tweets, which you can then add to your site to make them easily accessible for humans and for search engines. On first glance I am really liking this idea, however after adding Twylah to our site, our crawl diagnostics took a major spike in errors and alerts: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/90501/static/Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png Here is our Twylah page: http://tweets.hingeheads.com I am not a SEO expert, but the number of errors is worrying me. Are we getting penalized by Search Engines/Google because of the high number in errors/alerts? Curious to hear your thoughts. P.S. I have fwd this to the Twylah team. They will get back to me in the next few days.Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png
Technical SEO | | hingeheads0 -
CSS for SEO - can search engine see the text in the body?
We use CSS to arranging (absolute positioning) our content to makes it easier to crawl. I am using your On-Page Keyword Optimization tool and other tools to check our pages (i.e. http://www.psprint.com/gallery/invitation-cards), to make sure it works. For the “On-Page Keyword Optimization” tool, it gives a petty good grade (I guest it sees the text in the body). However, when I am using other tool to test the page (e.g. http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/) it could not see the text in the body. Did we do something wrong? Thanks Tom
Technical SEO | | tomchu0