SocialSomeone Else Grabbing My Blogspot Domain

Someone Else Grabbing My Blogspot Domain

Over the weekend we posted an item about David Krane, Director of Corporate PR, blogging at Kraneland.com.

A recent post on his site discusses how Yahoo erased about 200 messages that he stored on the Yahoo Mail servers cue to inactivity on his account.

Even Yahoo’s own Jeremy Zawodny, agreed that this “royally sucks.”

Jeremy’s right, it does. And here’s an example where inactivity on Google’s own Blogger service produced a similar sucky situation.

I use blogger to publish my ResourceShelf blog. Originally, it used the blogger-provided resourceshelf.blogspot.com. After i registered the Resourceshelf.com domain, I kept both sites updated as mirrors of each other.

After a software upgrade, Blogger no longer allowed me to publish in both places nor provided any way for me to redirect the Resourceshelf.Blogspot.Com domain to my own site. Even worse, since I no longer was publishing to ResourceShelf.blogspot.com Blogger released that domain for use by others (and without checking with me first).

Visit that site now, and you’ll find an SEO-oriented blog that now happily gains all the benefit of the nearly 2,000 links built up over time pointing at my OLD site. It may even be more, given that Google’s link reporting tool notoriously doesn’t show all the backlinks to a given domain.

That’s also why you’ll find the site third when doing a search on ResourceShelf. It’s not, but all the historic links built up over time says that it is.

Ironically, Danny S. tells me that if this had been a domain name that was lapsed and picked up by someone else, Google would have detected the new registration and not let “old” links count to help make the “new” site relevant. But because we’re dealing with a subdomain, there’s no registration records to check.

Moral of the story? Always start with your own domain name, rather than a subdomain or subdirectory of someone else’s. But it still would have been nice if Blogger had done a bit more to protect me.

Before we conclude this post, Danny just sent along the following note regarding David Krane’s blog.

FYI, Google commenting about Yahoo Mail already gained attention by Steve Rubel. But not noticed was this site note. While Krane publishes using Blogger, he writes the blog out to his own web hosting service — which apparently is Yahoo Website Services, http://website.yahoo.com/. You can see this by checking for a non-existing page on his blog — it brings up a generic Yahoo error page, http://kraneland.com/dddd. Guess Google better get started on offering web hosting. (-:

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