Forum Moderators: open
I was hoping someone more experienced could help me determine the best plan of attack for fixing a terrible situation our host has put us in. (All domains referenced are fictional :-) )
We run a site through an ecommerce hosting company. They have taken it upon themselves to change all client domains without even so much as an email notification. I noticed this several days ago when I went to our site, which was originally indexed as [examplehost.com...] and noticed it had been changed to [host4.examplehost.com...] The pagerank bar on Google is now grey, whereas we had a PR5 previously. The problem is when I had originally begun my net ventures :-) I had submitted this lengthier domain in addition to a shorter one (www.oursite.com) to all of the engines, not realizing this constituted a rather spammy technique.
Up until last index we were showing on Google for both www.oursite.com and www.examplehost.com/oursite. The www.oursite.com domain was redirected to the hosting company site, so users clicking on this would see the hosting comapny domain in their browser when they reached the site.
Google weeded out www.oursite.com on the latest indexing. Now the examplehost.com/oursite no longer exists and is only functioning as a redirect to the new subdomain address.
What I would like to do is take the www.oursite.com domain and have it so that this is the indexed one, and so it remains in the browser window instead of the hosting company domain when people access the site. Problem is, would this domain now be blacklisted since it was removed by Google in the last update? The number of links on oursite.com is almost the same as what we had for the hosting company domain, so I'm hoping if I can do this we should be able to maintain our net presence as much as possible.
I'm not sure what to do - can someone please offer any advice as to what would be the best solution to this problem? We've talked to the hosting company and apparently the previous domain "no longer exists". Imagine that. Legal action is pending, but in the interim how can we salvage our site? We get the vast majority of our traffic through Google...
Thanks so much :-)
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 1:03 am (utc) on Dec. 4, 2002]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
would this domain now be blacklisted since it was removed by Google in the last update?
I doubt that it's black listed. It probably just got dumped due to a duplicate content filter.
The only way I see of salvaging your site would be to move it to a different host. That will require moving to a new shopping cart apllication, but it would be worth it in the big picture.
If half of your existing links point to your domain and the site no longer exists at the previous location, your domain should regain rankings. It won't happen overnight, but it should happen.
