Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
-
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage.
Here's the breakdown:
-Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code
-The site is out of our control
-The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back
-The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email.
The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
-
If you are sure you want to downrank the old site, you can contact the webmasters linking to it and tell them about your new site. Telling them that there is no content on the old site should also help.
-
I think so too. But in the rare event that a genius out there sees our conundrum and knows a crazy trick, that'd be nice. Some kind of site migration loophole that allows you to map and redirect old URLs without ownership of a site. That's wishful thinking though.
-
what to do in the meantime to preserve the rankings
I think that your only immediate option is PPC.
-
I don't disagree. The legal part is not SEO-related. The SEO question that's posed is what to do in the meantime to preserve the rankings. Bear in mind that there are 2 possible outcomes (getting site back vs. not getting it back and starting fresh) and there's also not necessarily a good solution. Perhaps waiting and starting over is the answer. I don't know.
-
This is a question for attorneys rather than SEOs.
I would go get legal assistance. From my experience, it usually costs less than you fear.
-
Someone's squatting on that one. Perhaps we can try to buy that one somehow now that the opportunity presented itself...
-
Ouch, then yeah, I really doubt there is anything you guys can do about that. I say try to get fully matching brand name domain now, if possible
-
I phrased the question incorrectly originally. Turns out the guy owned the domain all along and during his exit no one had him sign the rights over. He took full advantage of it. Definitely a blunder.
The domain name is only a partial match of the brand name. It's [brand's name]blah.com so probably won't hold up in court or at least won't be an open and shut case.
Thanks so much for the input, Dmitrii. Greatly appreciated.
-
Hi there.
There are not many ways for you to get the domain back:
- Buy it from current owner;
- If the domain name is complete match of company's name or company's product, and this name is trademarked/copyrighted, you can get the domain back through court, since it would be a domain squatting by former employee.
But, if there is no trademark and domain was purchased legally - I believe there is no way for you guys to get it back, but buy it from that guy.
P.S. Why didn't you have on automatic renewal?!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google Seeing Way More Pages Than My Site Actually Has
For one of my sites, A-1 Scuba Diving And Snorkeling Adventures, Google is seeing way more pages than I actually have. It sees almost 550 pages but I only have about 50 pages in my XML. I am sure this is an error on my part. Here is the search results that show all my pages. Can anyone give me some guidance on what I did wrong. Is it a canonical url problem, a redirect problem or something else. Built on Wordpress. Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I just want to make sure I am delivering everything I can for the client.
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
What coding works for SEO and what coding doesn't?
Hi: I recently learned about inline styles and that Google started penalizing sites for that in October. Then I was told that Wix and Flash don't work (or work well) either for SEO as the engines won't crawl them (I think). Does anyone know of a blog that goes over everything that doesn't work so that I could recognize it when I look at someone's code. Anyone know of such a resource? Cheers, Wes
Technical SEO | | wrconard0 -
Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die
Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please. I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24. The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords. The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there. If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term). Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
New domain's Sitemap.xml file loaded to old domain - how does this effect SEO?
I have a client who recently changed their domain when they redesigned their site. The client wanted the old site to remain live for existing customers with links to the new domain. I guess as a workaround, the developer loaded the new domain's sitemap.xml file to the old domain. What SEO ramifications would this have if any on the primary (new) domain?
Technical SEO | | julesae0 -
Will SEO Moz index our keywords if the site is ALL https?
We have a site coming into beta next week. Playing around with SEO Moz, I had trouble getting the keywords to rank at all. Was this because the site is entirely https? If yes, what else can SEO Moz NOT do if the site is all https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Https-pages still in the SERP's
Hi all, my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content. Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow> I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up. Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index? Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))... thanx in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Site 'filtered' by Google in early July.... and still filtered!
Hi, Our site got demoted by Google all of a sudden back in early July. You can view the site here: http://alturl.com/4pfrj and you may read the discussions I posted in Google's forums here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6e8f9aab7e384d88&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276dc6687317641b&hl=en Those discussions chronicle what happened, and what we've done since. I don't want to make this a long post by retyping it all here, hence the links. However, we've made various changes (as detailed), such as getting rid of duplicate content (use of noindex on various pages etc), and ensuring there is no hidden text (we made an unintentional blunder there through use of a 3rd party control which used CSS hidden text to store certain data). We have also filed reconsideration requests with Google and been told that no manual penalty has been applied. So the problem is down to algorithmic filters which are being applied. So... my reason for posting here is simply to see if anyone here can help us discover if there is anything we have missed? I'd hope that we've addressed the main issues and that eventually our Google ranking will recover (ie. filter removed.... it isn't that we 'rank' poorly, but that a filter is bumping us down, to, for example, page 50).... but after three months it sure is taking a while! It appears that a 30 day penalty was originally applied, as our ranking recovered in early August. But a few days later it dived down again (so presumably Google analysed the site again, found a problem and applied another penalty/filter). I'd hope that might have been 30 or 60 days, but 60 days have now passed.... so perhaps we have a 90 day penalty now. OR.... perhaps there is no time frame this time, simply the need to 'fix' whatever is constantly triggering the filter (that said, I 'feel' like a time frame is there, especially given what happened after 30 days). Of course the other aspect that can always be worked on (and oft-mentioned) is the need for more and more original content. However, we've done a lot to increase this and think our Guide pages are pretty useful now. I've looked at many competitive sites which list in Google and they really don't offer anything more than we do..... so if that is the issue it sure is puzzling if we're filtered and they aren't. Anyway, I'm getting wordy now, so I'll pause. I'm just asking if anyone would like to have a quick look at the site and see what they can deduce? We have of course run it through SEOMoz's tools and made use of the suggestions. Our target pages generally rate as an A for SEO in the reports. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Go2Holidays0 -
Why do I have one page showing as two url's?
My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's: http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php. A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page. Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0