Rankings dropped - website not listed

[consultantinginfo]

Hi there

Our website domain was due for renewable at the end of August. Around the start of August when I got the reminder I logged in and paid for 10 years. I logged in to check the stats early Monday morning and update any plugins to find the site was down. After checking it showed the domain was expired. I logged into the domain providers site and it listed the website as expired despite having an expiry date of 2028.

I contacted customer services and they stated it was an error and would look into it. Due to the delay I paid again online as this managed to bring the domain back up and asked for a refund.

Since then the website has disappeared from google and Monday which is our best day is now a blank day with no inquiries. I've resubmitted the sitemap in search console. The site was down Sunday and part of Monday. It was crawled on Sunday by google and showed the error in search console when I checked on Monday.

We ranked well for a lot of terms which took years to build - will it be a case of google bringing our rankings back up once the site is crawled again? Anyone any idea how long it may take?

Does the domain provider have any responsibility for the lost business/hassle or is this a small print tough luck issue with domain providers?

Think I will have to look at some website motorising tools like pingdom as this is causing a lot of headache.

 

[StephenSumner]

Once Google sees your site back up again, it might need to recrawl it, it will start to rank it again and you may find that it wobbles around in various SERPs. But provided it was only down for a few days or weeks at most you should find yourself back where you were. Possibly a week or two to recover depending on how Google saw your site before the problem etc

 

[Alan]

Would you like to share your url?

Website monitoring uptimerobot is good and free.

Google position monitor serprobot is really nice. Set alerts, regular reports etc.

Does the domain provider have any responsibility for the lost business/hassle or is this a small print tough luck issue with domain providers?

You would need to check the T&C - but for instance this is what Goodaddy have to say in theirs ( their in capitals )

"IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGISTRY OPERATOR BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PERSON FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFIT OR GOODWILL, FOR ANY MATTER, WHETHER SUCH LIABILITY IS ASSERTED ON THE BASIS OF CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), BREACH OF WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ANY BREACH OF THIS AGREEMENT OR ITS INCORPORATED AGREEMENTS AND POLICIES YOUR INABILITY TO USE THE DOMAIN NAME, YOUR LOSS OF DATA OR FILES OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF THE REGISTRY OPERATOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES"

 

[consultantinginfo]

Thanks for the responses.

The domain was initially setup with vidahost and was switched over to TSO with the change of hands. As this was the first renewal of the domain since the change i's possible there was some bug that caused this to happen.

I've now signed up with uptimerobot to keep an eye on this. Just hope the rankings recover quick.

 

[justinaldridge]

I don't understand....how long was the site down? Was it 2 days only? Have I misread your post.

You should not have a site deindexed in 2 days. Are you talking about just the home page? Have you done a Fetch as Google in Search Console?

If you submitted a sitemap then within 24 hours the pages should all be reindexed.

If it's still not indexed then something else is wrong.

When you say "It was crawled on Sunday by google and showed the error in search console when I checked on Monday"....what error are you referring to? How do you know Google crawled it on Sunday?

 

[comperio]

If I understand the site was offline for a few weeks, and rankings have understandably dropped. Now that it is back online, rankings should be back around where they where in a few days.

If the domain provider made an error and you have proof of payment, then you can make a claim, but do not expect much, as it is the webmaster responsibility to check if his site is online or not (debatable).

 

[consultantinginfo]

The site was down 2 days. I found this out initially by attempting to log in and then by going to webmaster tools and seeing the DNS error. Traffic is down about 80-90% still. When searching the company name in google it is not showing the website but is starting to show when using "my website"


The sitemaps have been resubmitted. Hopefully it will start to reappear in a few days but not great given it was over a domain provider's error.

 

[justinaldridge]

Something else is causing an issue here. If a page is dropped for 2 days it should spring back up where it was before as soon as it's live again. I once had a site down for a month and when I put it back up it was ranking exactly where it was before.

Happy to take a closer look if you PM me the web address.....although not sure if that breaks the forum rules.

 

[Lee Oakley]

The site was down 2 days. I found this out initially by attempting to log in and then by going to webmaster tools and seeing the DNS error. Traffic is down about 80-90% still. When searching the company name in google it is not showing the website but is starting to show when using "my website"


The sitemaps have been resubmitted. Hopefully it will start to reappear in a few days but not great given it was over a domain provider's error.

Curious to know if this has resolved yet?

Whilst in theory it should return to normal in a matter of days, all things being equal, it can take a couple of weeks, particularly if your site is very big, as you maybe hitting your daily crawl budget which is preventing all your url's being re-indexed as quickly as you would obviously like or need.

I hope it comes back sooner rather than later!