Domain suspended by law. now what in terms of Google and new site

[artemi0]

So I have a forum about the same topic for different languages (english, french, german, spanish....) all as subdomains on the main domain.

So seems in France, a lawyer has requested to a court to suspend my domain because some users were talking about his client's business activity and he didn't like this, so without noticing me or my registrar (OVH) nor sending us a legal order, that lawyer has sent to a judge a request to suspend my domain, who has approved it (!) and requested OVH to suspend my domain, so they did so.

Also note, the content is not even hosted in OVH, but in a company in another country. This company hasn't been notified either, who should be, as the data they complain about is in their servers, not OVH's.

I have spoken with a lawyer and seems they can do this in France without noticing any other part. Just go to a judge, with some "proofs" (screenshots of the conversations) and ask for suspension, and if they are "lucky" as its the case, their petition is granted.

Obviously, at some point I will get my domain back, but OVH says they have to fill back a claim against this, and it might take weeks. They are shocked over this case and how come a judge has accepted and ruled about this.

So for me, during all this time, my domain is suspended, so I have no visits at all, causing me a huge economical damage, normally for all languages I have around 2M visitors per month. So, I was thinking maybe I should create for each forum a different domain for each country (.uk, .fr, .de, .es..) with the old content, removing that data that the lawyer has claimed as defamatory for his client obviously, and when I have my website back, just redirect the old url to those sites?

The thing is I can't afford to keep losing money for this hacing my domain and content blocked.

So the question is: How can I doi this without being penalised by Google for duplicated content over my own content? I would add the new domains in my same Google Search Console, but the shame is I can't do a 301 now, becuase as mentioned above, the domain is suspended. So what's the best solution here to do not penalised?

This situation is driving me crazy, as its totally unfair for me. Some help would be appreciated.

[goodroi]

Mods Note: We are an SEO forum so please ensure your comments are limited to SEO. This is not the place for legal advice. Those off-topic comments will be removed.

[lammert]

From an SEO perspective, this may be a real challenge. I expect the current domain to have a generic TLD like .com, .net or .org.

What you want to do is not only move the contents from each subdomain to their new country TLD domain but also carefully redirect each individual language.example.com/URL?parameters to the equivalent www.example.language/URL?parameters with a 301 redirect. Every single post and comment from the old domain should point to exactly the same post and comment on the new domain. This may be a challenge if your forum software both allows GET parameters to specify topics and rewritten URLs where the topic information is embedded in the URL itself. What you should try to achieve is that every external link which now exists on the Internet points to the right content on the new domain.

Ideally, you also change all absolute internal links which members have added to their posts from language.example.com to www.example.language to minimize the number of hops needed between a link on the site and its destination. Relative internal links are not a concern, they will automatically point to the new destination.

Also adding a canonical URL for each destination may help to search engines to figure out the new situation.

But it will still take quite a while--think in terms of months--before the search engines have fully respidered and reindexed the sites under the new URLs and restored rankings. In order to retain both the link use and visitors coming through currently existing links to your domain, you won't be able to take down the original generic domain name ever.

But for now, I would put all available energy in trying to reclaim the domain and restore the site functionality because every day the site is unavailable, both rankings and member engagement is hurt. If the duration of the outage is too long, members may leave permanently causing your earnings to take a permanent hit, even it the site is back up in the future.

[JesterMagic]

The problem you have is that no one will be able to find the new domain with your content since you cannot do a 301 redirect. If you setup a new domain google will still have to spider it and then rank it which will take a while and you will have no back links so you will not rank very high.

The only thing that might save you is if most of your users are registered and you have their email addresses. At least this way you can contact them and let them know of the new domain.

I think your best bet is to fight very hard and get your old domain back ASAP

On a side note I am very surprised that this can happen to a domain, I always though people would go after the web host. OVH must be your domain registrar then correct?

[artemi0]

First of all, I got my domain back in 4 days.

In the meantime I created a mirror site with the same domain name but with .net. I also verified this in GSC. (I had no idea I would get my domain back so quickly).

Now that my domain is back, I moved the Domain Property of the .net to the original Domain Property of the .com. In this time Google just indexed about 300 pages of the cloned domain .net.

Also, I set all proper redirections from the .net to the original .com to the .com equivalent pages.

In Ahrefs there are no noticeable changes, just a stop in the organic traffic growth we were having for the past weeks.

I think I did in terms of SEO I did all I had to do?

Now will have to wait for Google to see how it digest having had my website down for 4 days, there still nothing in my GSC, just some messages saying Google couldn't reach my sitemaps, which I already resubmitted and were correctly fetched.

What do you guys think? Will I be penalised for these 4 days offline? Will it take me a while to recover from this incident?

[tangor]

Penalized? Probably not ... after all .net is not .com (or whatever it was originally). That said, you are NOT starting out a ZERO so expect some disturbance in your traffic/revenue of old.

When you can recover your original domain (hopefully!) you can redirect all the new to the old and get back in the saddle again.

What you HAVE accomplished is wonderful ... but it is simply NOT the original and in that regard there will be losses.

Then again, you just might end up in a better place than you started!

Work it! Go for it! Meanwhile, kill all the UGC. :)

That kind of exposure can be ... well, you already know!

[phranque]

First of all, I got my domain back in 4 days.

first thing i would do is transfer the domain to another registrar in another, "friendlier" jurisdiction to avoid this in the future.

[JesterMagic]

first thing i would do is transfer the domain to another registrar in another, "friendlier" jurisdiction to avoid this in the future.

100% agree with this. Use someone different from your host as well.

Glad you got it back in 4 days. Was your site still ranked in the SERPS at the time? Once Google figures out you are back your traffic should come back rather quickly I would think. It looks like you did everything I would do in regards to the Google Search Console to let them know your domain is up and running.

Keep us updated on how long things take to get back to normal in the SERPS.