I post on a few forums, and this week came across a real sad case. I will keep it deliberately vague as I don’t want to identify anyone or anything.
A company that had been trading for over 20 years woke up to find their website down. they chased their supplier who told them he would sort it. He then came back and said ‘your domain is in redemption’, don’t worry, I will sort it….
So they DID worry, and he didn’t sort it. It turns out that someone else bought their domain the instant it came out onto the market. This was a 20 year old domain that had thousands of genuine backlinks pointing to it.
Why did all this happen? It happened due to a series of unfortunate events, with domain registrars closing down, transferring business etc and reminders going to dead email and paper reminders going to dead snail mail address. But ALL of this could have been avoided, if the owner had placed sufficient value on the domain, and made it their duty to ensure it was looked after, and remained their property.
HERE is the question though. How do YOU keep track of your domains? I use a spreadsheet, I have renewals in my outlook to remind me when they are coming up for renewal, and MOST OPF ALL… I make sure my details are up to date with the domain administrator, be it .co.uk (nominet), or .com .info etc.
Don’t lose your Business because of Poor Admin practices.
OWG knows that people are now going to be thinking ‘Are my details up date?’
Hi Welsh,
Just stumbled into your blog from your signature on the forum. This article hit a cord as it’s similar to the issue that I queried on the forum earlier today.
I totally agree with your comments, a lot of businesses (including the one I was discussing) don’t realise how much their domain is worth to their company.
The 1st response from my friend was to ask me if I could just start a new .com for them and tell their old webmaster where to go, but I explained it would be a disaster to lose their current domain that ranks so well after being online for 8 years and having several good backlinks.
Your domain name may only cost a fiver or so, but once you’ve been using it online for a few years it’s worth so much more.
Love the blog by the way – I’ll be back to read more SEO advice !
I read that thread as well and have had a hard time believing the op, if the domain was really 20 years old that would mean it was regged in 1988. Do you really believe that?
I have a reseller account with a hosting company and have many business clients’ sites on there so it’s always a worry that said hosts will go kaput! You would hope they would give you warning but you never know :o(
Such a wake up call OWG. I woke up one day to find my site down and after hours of hair pulling and sending rude emails to my host company it turned out I hadn’t informed them when I changed my email address, so I didn’t get the renewal emails woops.
That has got to be one of the worst things that could happen. Also thanks for the reminder, I have one on the drop in 2 days – a juicy beast too.
Think its your own fault if you loose it though. You should manage your domains yourself, not have a web designer do it.
I have all mine at GoDaddy. Get warnings. Just have to make sure you take action 🙂
Great Post OWG and couldn’t agree more, ive actually lost a domain in the same way although on not such a grand scale it was still disappointing , on the other hand ive recently acquired a domain because of that very reason so i suppose Karma is with me 😉
I don’t think the situation is quite so bad.
We’ve had customers call us that their hosting is down and we soon find its because they haven’t renewed their domain.
From this point you have at least one month to sort it out. So yes, there is a problem with disruption to the website and possible knock on to SEO in the shorter term – but you’ve got to try really hard to actually lose the domain.
Even where customers have lost their login details etc we’ve generally found that they can contact the registrar and prove ownership (even if it just means uploading a specified document to the webspace).