The question today comes from Raoof, who asks:
“I completely lost my website due to financial disputes with the hosting company. I have no backup and the only thing I have left is a domain.
I am currently preparing a new website with the previous content and theme. Can I use the previous domain or not? What is your suggestion?”
This is a difficult, but not uncommon, issue to face. You invested time, money, and resources in creating your website. To lose it is highly frustrating.
From an SEO perspective, it might feel like all is lost – the topical authority, the backlinks, your high-performing content.
But don’t worry, it’s not! I’m going to take you through a few steps to recover as much of your website and previous rankings as possible.
I see no issue with reusing your old domain address for the recovered site. That is, as long as no other site was hosted on it while yours was down.
If you owned the domain name throughout this time, you should be fine to restore your site at that address.
In fact, I would highly recommend it to ensure you recapture as much of your old site’s authority as you can.
Recovering Your Assets
The first step is to recover as much of your existing website as you can. You might not have a backup of your site, but thankfully, the internet does!
Content
I would start by going to the Wayback Machine. This is essentially a non-profit archive of the internet.
It claims to have saved over 928 billion webpages. There is a high chance that some of those will be yours!
You can search for your website domain and scroll back through time to when screenshots of your pages were taken. That should enable you to copy and paste some, if not all, of the copy that was on your site.
I would also suggest having a look at your analytics program to identify what your top-visited content was. This should be what you look to recover or recreate first.
Authority
The good news with still having your website domain is that you will still have the opportunity to recover backlinks that were pointing to your pages.
It’s important to host your content on the same URLs as it previously was. This means that if you still have links pointing to your site from external sources, they will continue to work when you set the URL live again.
If you are unable to recreate the exact URL for some reason, make sure to implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one to retain the value of those links.
Reclaim Old Backlinks
If your site went down during the hosting dispute, your webpages were likely to return a 404 or other non-200 status code.
This could mean that external publications chose to change their links from pointing to your page to another so as to still enable their visitors to reach usable content.
This doesn’t mean that those links are gone forever. Evaluate which links were lost during the domain issues using a backlink analytics tool, and begin reaching out to those publications to inform them that your content is back.
It may be that they choose to link to your content again over the newer content they found.
Link Building To Help Crawling
External links aren’t just helpful for signaling relevancy and authority; they can also help to encourage the search bots to crawl the content they link to.
If your site has been offline for a while, it’s possible that the bots have reduced their frequency of crawling. New backlinks could indicate that the website is worth crawling more frequently again.
Technical
There is more to restoring your website to its former glory than just recovering the old content, of course.
A large part of what makes a website well-optimized for search engines and humans alike is its technical foundation.
Same Architecture
Where possible, try to recreate the website’s architecture.
I’ve already mentioned trying to re-use the old URLs, but also consider how and where they linked to each other.
Use the same menu structure and anchor text. This will help reinforce the relevance of the pages to each other and demonstrate that the site is the same as it was before.
Submit To Be Crawled
Once you’ve got your website back to how it was, you will want to let the search engines know to crawl it again.
Aside from encouraging crawling by getting new backlinks, as already mentioned, you can submit a request in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for their bots to recrawl individual pages. Note that you may need to verify ownership of the domain in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools again.
Choose some of your more important pages so that they get crawled and back into the indexes as soon as possible.
XML Sitemaps
You should also make sure you have set up XML sitemaps again for the pages that you have recovered.
Submit these to the search consoles to further inform the Google and Bing bots of your pages’ existence, so they can crawl them and see that they are live again.
Take Note Of Any Issues Found
As the search engines begin to recrawl the site, take note of any issues Google and Bing report on through their search consoles.
There may be new issues that have crept in during the rebuild of your website that weren’t there before.
Improve
You can use this as an opportunity to evaluate what was working with your website and what wasn’t.
The temptation might be to recover and rebuild the site to reflect its former state. However, you might find that you can actually improve it instead.
What Were You Ranking For
As you review your old content’s performance, take a look at whether it ranked well before it was lost.
It may be that, instead of recovering it and uploading it exactly as it was before, you can use this as an opportunity to improve its relevancy to the search phrases users would use to land on it.
Review competitors’ content that has been flourishing while yours has been lost. Take note of what the top-ranking content contains that your recovered content doesn’t.
What’s Changed In The Industry
If your website has been down for a while during this hosting dispute, then the industry may have moved on.
Start to look for gaps in the content that your site used to address and what users are looking for now.
Are there new trends, products, or services that are becoming popular in your industry that you have not covered with your site previously?
Protect
The most important step once you have recovered and improved your site is to reduce the risk of losing it in the future.
You will hopefully never have an issue with your hosting again, but other issues can occur that can cause your website to go offline.
Backups
First of all, take backups of your new site. Many content management systems make it easy to do this, but if yours doesn’t, or if you’ve built it yourself, consider what you can save offline.
Save Your Content
Take copies of all the written content on your site. Make sure that you save it somewhere that isn’t directly linked to your website in case you run into issues again.
Don’t forget to save copies of the images you use, especially if they are unique to your website.
Save Your Meta
Take copies of each page’s search engine optimization.
For example, download the page title and description alongside your main body content.
Mark up the headers and save the image descriptions, and keep the filenames as you used on the site. This will speed up the recovery of your site in the future.
Save Your Schema Markup
Don’t forget to take copies of any bespoke code you used. This includes schema markup. This could save you a lot of time in the future, especially if you write your own schema rather than using plugins.
This can also help if you end up migrating from one CMS to another that doesn’t use the same schema modules.
Resuming Your Optimization Efforts
It is horrifying to think that the website you have spent so much time on is gone for good. Thankfully, it’s probably not.
It’s worth consider that there may be legal recourse available to you to aid in the recovery of your website.
Make sure to check your hosting terms of service thoroughly, as they may give avenues you can explore to regain control of your content.
It may not be as simple as asking your hosting provider for support if you are already in a legal dispute with them, but there may be some legal options available to you.
In the future, it is important to consider the trustworthiness and levels of support provided by your hosting provider.
Look up reviews of potential hosting services before committing to them to make sure you don’t end up going through a similar struggle again.
Losing access to your website can be costly in terms of money and time, and a highly stressful situation. But, follow the steps above and you should get back to working on your website.
More Resources:
- Wayback Machine: 5 Alternatives To Try
- How to Launch a New Website: A Complete Guide
- The Complete Technical SEO Audit Workbook
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
