I Accidentally Screwed This Guy Over - What Would You Do?

[drew3806]

Originally Posted by coopthadaawg

This was the first website I've ever made so I had no idea that during the whole domain transfer process, any down time can erase rankings, which is obviously what happened.


Thanks

I was lucky enough to sell some sites to a buyer who knew what he was doing when I sold my first sites.

For future sales to keep the downtime to a minimum, bundle the site's files into a zip file and send them to the buyer. My sites were Wordpress sites and this is a fairly simple process. Here is a link on how:

https://flippa.com/help/transfer-a-wordpress-site

Have the buyer notify you when the files are installed in their hosting package and then you can push the domain name. This will allow you to coordinate your efforts and keep downtime to a minimum.

I have sold 18 sites following this process and they all retained their search engine rankings and the buyers were able to increase the rankings after the transfer. If your buyer is not able to do this on his own, the Flippa reference above should allow you to take care of it for them.

Hope this helps on future sales, but at least you are taking action. I let fear of having something like you described happening keep me from selling sites for a long time.

[johnyeo90]

As you said you made $400 per month with that website, so why you sell it with only 3000 bucks?

[SEOChief]

Originally Posted by coopthadaawg

Hi guys, I just wanted to share with you something that happened to me, and hopefully find out how I can avoid it in the future.

About 2 weeks ago I sold my blog for $3k on flippa, naturally I was ecstatic and the whole escrow process went smoothly, and within 5 days I had $2,951 in my bank.

Now keep in mind this was a site ranking on page 1 for about 6 different keywords, and on page 2-3 for 15 more, and had been pulling in around $400 a month.

A couple days after I sold the website, I got an email from the guy saying that the website had not made any sales, and that out of curiosity he had checked the rankings for the website - only to find out ALL of the first page and most of the second page rankings were gone.

I checked to confirm this, and it is true, all of the rankings basically vanished overnight.

This was the first website I've ever made so I had no idea that during the whole domain transfer process, any down time can erase rankings, which is obviously what happened.

I feel like a complete a$ about it, as I am sure this guy feels like I robbed him, any ideas?

Thanks

Personally I would encourage taking this in at least two steps.

First, let your buyer know that you are willing to take the site back with a full refund.

Second, however offer them the option of monitoring the site for a month to see if the keywords return to the ranking status that they had previous to the unfortunate situation.

Leave the buyer in control of the options but do whatever you can to salvage the situation. As so many others have stated it is great to see high ethics within the WWW. Thank you for setting the bar for the rest of us.