SEO Apocalypse, A Lost URL Story
I’m sure you’ve heard the story, one of your potential customers has had a website for many years, they want to come over to your SEO and hosting service and work with you but their present hosts are holding them to ransom. “Pay us £XXX amount of moolah or we won’t release your domain name, will take your website offline and stop your email”. Hardly what any company owner wants to hear!
We abhor this sort of treatment here at FireflySEO, and whilst we recognise that bills have to be paid for services rendered, there’s no excuse for this sort of behaviour when someone simply wants to move hosts.
The end result of all this? Well, of course if the site gets indexed while it has been taken down by the host holding our potential customer to ransom, then all of the hard-won placements by years of SEO on the website have been wasted, and although the results will eventually bounce back, this represents a lot of lost revenue to the beleaguered owner of the website as well as extra money and effort to get the site back up once control has been taken again of the domain name (if ever).
So what exactly can you do if one of your domains gets held to ransom? Well I believe it’s not unheard of for hosting companies to be sued nowadays for loss of Search Engine rankings due to hosting companies taking company websites offline for protracted periods of time, so that may be one thing to consider.
The other thing to consider of course (if you have a .uk domain at least) is to get Nominet involved. It’s my understanding that a company which has been using a domain name for it’s business has a legal entitlement to that domain name despite anything that is recorded in the WHOIS records, so if your .uk domain has been hijacked by one of these URL pirates you can and will (if you are using it for business purposes) get the domain back eventually.
Of course if your hijacked domain name does end up as an SEO apocalypse for your website, you are going to have an uphill struggle to get your search engine positions back, no matter how much search engine optimisation you do, and in some cases we have had to start from scratch with a new domain for some of our clients which really is not funny!
