The query at the moment comes from Raoof, who asks:
“I fully misplaced my web site because of monetary disputes with the internet hosting firm. I’ve no backup and the one factor I’ve left is a website.
I’m presently making ready a brand new web site with the earlier content material and theme. Can I exploit the earlier area or not? What’s your suggestion?”
This can be a troublesome, however not unusual, subject to face. You invested time, cash, and assets in creating your web site. To lose it’s extremely irritating.
From an search engine marketing perspective, it’d really feel like all is misplaced – the topical authority, the backlinks, your high-performing content material.
However don’t fear, it’s not! I’m going to take you thru a number of steps to get well as a lot of your web site and former rankings as attainable.
I see no subject with reusing your outdated area handle for the recovered web site. That’s, so long as no different web site was hosted on it whereas yours was down.
In the event you owned the area title all through this time, you have to be tremendous to revive your web site at that handle.
In actual fact, I might extremely advocate it to make sure you recapture as a lot of your outdated web site’s authority as you may.
Recovering Your Property
Step one is to get well as a lot of your current web site as you may. You may not have a backup of your web site, however fortunately, the web does!
Content material
I might begin by going to the Wayback Machine. That is primarily a non-profit archive of the web.
It claims to have saved over 928 billion webpages. There’s a excessive probability that a few of these will probably be yours!
You’ll be able to seek for your web site area and scroll again via time to when screenshots of your pages have been taken. That ought to allow you to repeat and paste some, if not all, of the copy that was in your web site.
I might additionally counsel taking a look at your analytics program to establish what your top-visited content material was. This ought to be what you look to get well or recreate first.
Authority
The excellent news with nonetheless having your web site area is that you’ll nonetheless have the chance to get well backlinks that have been pointing to your pages.
It’s essential to host your content material on the identical URLs because it beforehand was. Because of this in the event you nonetheless have hyperlinks pointing to your web site from exterior sources, they may proceed to work while you set the URL stay once more.
If you’re unable to recreate the precise URL for some cause, be certain to implement a 301 redirect from the outdated URL to the brand new one to retain the worth of these hyperlinks.
Reclaim Outdated Backlinks
In case your web site went down through the internet hosting dispute, your webpages have been more likely to return a 404 or different non-200 standing code.
This might imply that exterior publications selected to alter their hyperlinks from pointing to your web page to a different in order to nonetheless allow their guests to succeed in usable content material.
This doesn’t imply that these hyperlinks are gone endlessly. Consider which hyperlinks have been misplaced through the area points utilizing a backlink analytics instrument, and start reaching out to these publications to tell them that your content material is again.
It could be that they select to hyperlink to your content material once more over the newer content material they discovered.
Hyperlink Constructing To Assist Crawling
Exterior hyperlinks aren’t simply useful for signaling relevancy and authority; they will additionally assist to encourage the search bots to crawl the content material they hyperlink to.
In case your web site has been offline for some time, it’s attainable that the bots have diminished their frequency of crawling. New backlinks may point out that the web site is price crawling extra continuously once more.
Technical
There may be extra to restoring your web site to its former glory than simply recovering the outdated content material, in fact.
A big a part of what makes a web site well-optimized for search engines like google and people alike is its technical basis.
Identical Structure
The place attainable, attempt to recreate the web site’s structure.
I’ve already talked about making an attempt to re-use the outdated URLs, but additionally take into account how and the place they linked to one another.
Use the identical menu construction and anchor textual content. This can assist reinforce the relevance of the pages to one another and show that the location is identical because it was earlier than.
Submit To Be Crawled
When you’ve obtained your web site again to the way it was, you’ll want to let the various search engines know to crawl it once more.
Other than encouraging crawling by getting new backlinks, as already talked about, you may submit a request in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Instruments for his or her bots to recrawl particular person pages. Observe that you could be have to confirm possession of the area in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Instruments once more.
Select a few of your extra essential pages in order that they get crawled and again into the indexes as quickly as attainable.
XML Sitemaps
You must also be sure you have arrange XML sitemaps once more for the pages that you’ve recovered.
Submit these to the search consoles to additional inform the Google and Bing bots of your pages’ existence, to allow them to crawl them and see that they’re stay once more.
Take Observe Of Any Points Discovered
As the various search engines start to recrawl the location, be aware of any points Google and Bing report on via their search consoles.
There could also be new points which have crept in through the rebuild of your web site that weren’t there earlier than.
Enhance
You should use this as a chance to judge what was working along with your web site and what wasn’t.
The temptation could be to get well and rebuild the location to replicate its former state. Nonetheless, you would possibly discover that you could truly enhance it as an alternative.
What Have been You Rating For
As you assessment your outdated content material’s efficiency, check out whether or not it ranked properly earlier than it was misplaced.
It could be that, as an alternative of recovering it and importing it precisely because it was earlier than, you should use this as a chance to enhance its relevancy to the search phrases customers would use to land on it.
Assessment rivals’ content material that has been flourishing whereas yours has been misplaced. Be aware of what the top-ranking content material accommodates that your recovered content material doesn’t.
What’s Modified In The Business
In case your web site has been down for some time throughout this internet hosting dispute, then the trade could have moved on.
Begin to search for gaps within the content material that your web site used to deal with and what customers are on the lookout for now.
Are there new tendencies, merchandise, or providers which can be changing into in style in your trade that you haven’t coated along with your web site beforehand?
Shield
Crucial step upon getting recovered and improved your web site is to scale back the danger of dropping it sooner or later.
You’ll hopefully by no means have a problem along with your internet hosting once more, however different points can happen that may trigger your web site to go offline.
Backups
Initially, take backups of your new web site. Many content material administration programs make it straightforward to do that, but when yours doesn’t, or in the event you’ve constructed it your self, take into account what it can save you offline.
Save Your Content material
Take copies of all of the written content material in your web site. Just be sure you put it aside someplace that isn’t straight linked to your web site in case you run into points once more.
Don’t overlook to avoid wasting copies of the pictures you utilize, particularly if they’re distinctive to your web site.
Save Your Meta
Take copies of every web page’s SEO.
For instance, obtain the web page title and outline alongside your major physique content material.
Mark up the headers and save the picture descriptions, and preserve the filenames as you used on the location. This can velocity up the restoration of your web site sooner or later.
Save Your Schema Markup
Don’t overlook to take copies of any bespoke code you used. This consists of schema markup. This might prevent loads of time sooner or later, particularly in the event you write your personal schema quite than utilizing plugins.
This will additionally assist if you find yourself migrating from one CMS to a different that doesn’t use the identical schema modules.
Resuming Your Optimization Efforts
It’s horrifying to suppose that the web site you’ve gotten spent a lot time on is gone for good. Fortunately, it’s in all probability not.
It’s price take into account that there could also be authorized recourse obtainable to you to assist within the restoration of your web site.
Make sure that to test your internet hosting phrases of service totally, as they could give avenues you may discover to regain management of your content material.
It is probably not so simple as asking your internet hosting supplier for help in case you are already in a authorized dispute with them, however there could also be some authorized choices obtainable to you.
Sooner or later, it is very important take into account the trustworthiness and ranges of help offered by your internet hosting supplier.
Search for critiques of potential internet hosting providers earlier than committing to them to be sure you don’t find yourself going via the same wrestle once more.
Shedding entry to your web site might be expensive in phrases of time and cash, and a extremely disturbing scenario. However, comply with the steps above and it’s best to get again to working in your web site.
Extra Assets:
Featured Picture: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
