What if an old site goes into PENDINGDELETE status

[Bull135]

Hi,

I have an old domain which accidentally was set as PENDINGDELETE by the registry. It's now not resolving to any ip address any more.

Actually I was relocating from the old domain to a new domain. Just one month before it become PENDINGDELETE, I have submitted a "Chang of Address" in Google Webmasters Tools as well as setup the web server to 301 redirect all urls on old domain to the new domain.

I have some sub-questions for this case:

1. What will happen to the effectiveness of the "Change of Address" in Google Webmasters Tool after old domain is dropped. As a domain is deleted, I have no way to maintain the verified ownership of the it in case Google asks me to reverify.

2. Suppose during last month before it's deleted, Googlebot had crawled 50% of urls on old domains, detected the 301 redirects and save them to its index. When Googlebot crawls those 50% urls again after the old domain is deleted, as those urls are not resolving to any web server, will Googlebot retain the last 301 redirects or drop the 301 redirects as well?

3. After a domain is deleted, how soon will Google purge urls on old domain from its index?

Thank you.

Best regards

Jack Zhao

[Branagan]

When a domain goes into pending delete status it's DNS have been usually deactivated for a while, generally since the domain entered it's redemption grace period (depending on the domain extension and the registrar).

It usually takes some time for a 301 to 'settle', so I would renew the old domain and keep it redirected for a while, here you'll find a compendium of data on the subject.

The thing is, if the domain has gone into pending delete status, the domain will be deleted soon (5 day period) and you won't be able to renew it. You could use a back order service to try and snatch it, or you could try to do it by hand if the domain is not valuable.

1- When the domain expires (probably sooner), you will loose access to the domain hence the address change will stop working, you'll see that in Webmaster Tools.

2- The pages will cease to exist and so will the redirections, the advise is to keep control of the old domain for at least 180 days.

3- It depends on several factors, like the amount of indexed pages, the amount of links pointing to them, crawling rate, etc. but for an average site it usually takes a couple of months for it to completely disappear from the index (can be a lot faster though).

[Chris.Menke]

Those are all good questions and I'm hoping we get some good answers.  In the meantime, I believe you can still renew your domain if it is pending delete.  Have you tried renewing it at this point so that you can maintain the redirects?