A friend has owned a website for a long time. Unfortunately the guy who built the site for him owns the domain name and is now trying to get him to pay an outrageous monthly fee. So, we set up a new site for him with a new domain name. I sent requests to many of the sites linking to the old site asking them to update their links. I also filled out a dmoz request for an update, but it’s been 2 months and still the old site is ranking number 1, while the new site is at the top of page 3 (for Google).
Does anyone have any suggestions for helping the process along?
Old site is: http://www.mounoftunisrestaurant.com
New site is: http://www.mounoftunis.la
Ahh… thanks for pointing out .la’s sorted past, Jasmina. Network Solutions has been advertising the .la domain to Los Angelenos for quite a while now, so that one caught me by surprise.
Thank you for the Google Places suggestion. I’d completely forgotten about that.
As Black Max wrote, it may be similar as .tv: google officials admitted google considers the country domain .tv just like an international one. Google may do so as for .la too.
I’m assuming he wants to use the .la domain (Laos) because it seems to be a Los Angeles domain. Same reason why television-based sites sometimes use the Tuvalu domain of .tv for their sites.
That person did wrong but when you don’t have the access to the old website, you can’t do anything. 301- redirection is the best way to pass the link juice and PR to the new domain but in your case it is impossible to do that as well.
Best thing that you can do is to inform Google about this issue and also the thing that I didn’t understand is that why you opt for .la domain when your restaurant is in California?
The option that you are left with now is to get the backlinks updated and ask the webmaster of those websites with which you exchanged links to update the details with your new domain and start promoting your new website from scratch.
Redirection 301 and google webmaster account are the compulsory actions when the domain name has changed.
Since this is not possible for you, try once more to have fully updated your backlinks: as soon as you succeed in doing so, your new site will probably be better ranked than the old site. But also, the market value of the old domain will then go down so that your unethical partner has little interest to keep it in the market.
Another possible action would concern the use of the name of the restaurant: the owner of the restaurant should officially inform the “old” partner that is no longer allowed to use the name of the restaurant in his web site since he is no the owner of the restaurant.
You may also inform google (both the adsense division and the copyright infringement division) about the misuse of the restaurant name:
– this may lead to the close of the adsense account of the old domain
– copyright infringement will put the old domain fully out of the google result pages.
On the other hand I am not sure you really help your friend by putting your new site in a domain .la (which is the national domain of Laos). This is not appropriate for a restaurant in Hollywood, California (see the geographic target rules at google).
Therefore, I suggest you
–either to choose a more appropriate domain before acting as above-mentioned
– or to inform the old partner of the possible actions against him (see again above) and get back the old domain at a fair price.
Have you still got access to edit the HTML on the old site? If yes, then do these two things.
Verify Google Webmaster Tools on both the old site and new site. Once you have done this, you can directly inform Google the site has changed. It’s real quick and easy.
Place canonical tags in the <head> tag of the old site pointing to the new site.
301 redirect is a way to tell browsers and search engines that a web page or site has permanently moved to a new location. Usually a 301 redirect includes the address where you move the resource. Internet browsers usually follow 301 redirects to the new location automatically, without user intervention. 301 redirect is used each time the site moved to a new domain (URL), so that search engines can quickly change their indices, and in theory to keep the search engines that your site was on the old domain .
& Traffic will also be redirected
From what you are explaining looks like your friend trying to escape past due fees for his website by making a new one.
Because I don’t see why in the hell he would get a “dot”.la wich is LAOS (country) website instead of trying to settle with the former webmaster to get the original http://mounoftunisrestaurant.com which rank number one in Google for “Moun of Tunis restaurant” keywords. If I was him, I would not try to make a (.la) domain to rank, because it is a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) instead I would try to pay whatever past due fees his has on his old website account to get the original domain that was used for his restaurant.
The owner of Moun of Tunis had the misfortune of hiring an unethical business to create a website for him many years ago. This dishonorable business put the domain name in their name, instead of his (although they were purchasing it on his behalf). They hosted the site on GoDaddy, then charged him between $50 and $100 a month every month for the past 10-15 years for that hosting (which likely cost them closer to $50 a year). When the time came to redesign the website and he learned from other firms how extravagantly he’d been overpaying every month, he chose to use a different firm for the re-design. He didn’t have access to the old domain name, so he purchased a new one.
The shady business then offered to sell his domain to him for an enormous sum. When he refused to pay the ridiculous price, they took down his site and put up text saying that dishes cost $500, the restaurant was located on the moon, and that the domain was for sale (which might lead people to think the restaurant has closed), among other outrageous statements.
This is not the behavior of a reputable company. The owner of Moun of Tunis has done nothing wrong. He should have terminated all ties to that dishonest company many years ago.
And to your other point… I believed it’s already been well hashed out in this thread, that the .la domain used to be for the country of Laos, but it is now documented fact that .la means Los Angeles.
