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.

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About Konstantinos Zournas

Studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and now living in Athens, Greece. Love domains and building websites. Went online in 1995, learned about HTML in 1996 and about domains in 2002. Started publishing the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

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