Domain Name Owner Says Google Ranking Returned 30 Days After Domain Expired

A WebmasterWorld thread called “Accidentally let domain expire for a day: Now site’s gone from Google. Temporary or permanent?” was started by a domain name owner and webmaster that let a domain name expire for a few hours, which resulted in his site being removed from Google and then exactly a month of bad rankings.

Had a domain on GoDaddy set to auto-renew, didn’t realize my card on file had expired.

My site showed GoDaddy’s “Expired Domain” page, then was offline completely for about an hour (after I renewed/while it re-propagated).

So I quickly renewed domain; it wasn’t expired or ‘down’ for more any more than a few hours.

Now when you search my normal keywords that I rank for, my site isn’t there any more.

 

The domain expired In mid-July and was renewed a few hours later. 4 days later the traffic was down about 50% from Google. By August 6th, traffic was still down 40%. Then on August 15th, about a month since the domain expired, the rankings were back to normal.

Just in case anyone is wondering – I just now today returned to the Google results and traffic is back to normal!

It took almost exactly 1 month to the day, from when the domain expired, to finally return to the results as normal.