Devaluing a Domain

vikingraider · May 13, 2013

I am quite narked right now, as is my father in law here in Denmark. In 2007 I bought him a domain name that matched his work as a taxi driver - basically the name of the town we live in plus the Danish word for Taxi.

After 6 years building the site and we are top in google, so get every relevant search without paying anything. All great, but now two of his ex-colleagues have a new taxi firm which matches exactly our domain name.

it now seems that the registrar DK_Hostmaster is going to come down on the side of them, who have lodged a complaint that their business name is being stolen. I find that incredible, but it seems real business names have priority over the domain being registered earlier and the name on being generic search words.

So, how do I degrade this domain in the final 3 months before we hand it over and ensure maximum traffic and google ranking goes to my father-in-law's new website?

Murray · May 13, 2013

If you wanted to take away all the SEO value that you spent time building yourself before you hand over the domain, I think that is far enough, you could disavow all the links pointing to it in google webmaster tools.

But I think your time would be better suited after that put into positive things like establishing your new site.

grantw · May 13, 2013

Are you 100% sure you're going to lose? It would be a very odd situation if you did as it would mean that anyone could set up a business on a generic term and reverse hijack generic domains that were in use long before the business was formed!

Grant

vikingraider · May 14, 2013

Agreed

grantw said:
Are you 100% sure you're going to lose? It would be a very odd situation if you did as it would mean that anyone could set up a business on a generic term and reverse hijack generic domains that were in use long before the business was formed!

Grant

I know, bizarre isn't it? If it's the same here in the UK, you may as well go around registering all the big towns/cities and main services you'd search for in google. In my case, ConsettTaxi.co.uk is still available, bet there are bigger towns still free too.

However, he's read the letter from DK-Hostmaster (it's in Danish and legal words, so a struggle for me) and seems to think it's likely. I told him to argue it's generic keywords, no-one else ever registered it before, etc. but we'll see how it goes. Suppose I am gaining some good dispute experience here, if nothing else!

vikingraider · May 14, 2013

Murray said:
If you wanted to take away all the SEO value that you spent time building yourself before you hand over the domain, I think that is far enough, you could disavow all the links pointing to it in google webmaster tools.

But I think your time would be better suited after that put into positive things like establishing your new site.

Thanks for the info. I am trying to build links on his new website, so we hope to get there again with this one.

I'd never heard of disavowing links, but sounds like a good way right at the end to make sure they get none of the value we built.