Google deranked .com and ranked .net - need help!

[StrategicMarketingTN]

This is kind of complicated but I'll try to simplify it.

I have a client's website that I've been SEOing for about 4-5 months. It's been ranking on 1st page for 10 keywords in 5 cities (50 in total) with its .com extension. I've done all kinds of linking, articles, videos and etc.

Today, suddenly, .com is not ranked anywhere in the top 1,000 results. Instead, his .net (which I didn't even know existed) is popping up on 1st page for about half of these keywords. It's got no links to it at all.

The .net is actually just a shell - it's iframed to show .com inside of it.

The worst thing is that the exact URL that Google ranked for all these keywords is www.clientwebsite.net/index.html - which does not exist!

What is going on????

Why would it de-rank a good SEO'ed website and rank a page that does not exist?

What would you do in this case?

This website is a full e-commerce software website that is specific for my client's industry and we can't just go in and add pages (otherwise, I'd just go and throw a new index.html to redirect to .com site).

Would a permanent redirect from .net to .com on godaddy be the best solution?

Client is panicking...

Need fellow warrior's help!

Thanks

Katerina

[paulgl]

Not sure I follow everything.

But that index.html may be another matter. There is always
an index page. If you want the domain to point to another
page, you need a redirect. Servers have a default setting.
In my case they will look for a index.php page. If that does
not exist, it goes to the index.html page. I have one redirected
to a blog subpage using 301.

Perhaps the server settings got changed somehow. The google
bot may now be redirected to the index.html page.

A quick fix would be to 301 the index.html to your favorite domain.
On second thought, a 301 global setting would be even better.

Paul

[StrategicMarketingTN]

My client registered the .net URL at Godaddy and used "forward with masking" to redirect it to .com site. I guess godaddy creates an Iframe in this case.

The .com URL is pointed to the server of the company who does his ecommerce site. It looks like their software uses index.php in the website structure.

So I'm puzzled where Google even dug up index.html for the .net site when it has always been an iframe of .com?

Now, I just changed the setting inside godaddy to "forward only" so that it just forwards and does not try to iframe it.

However, I'm still stuck with .net/index.html ranking for all the keywords which is a broken link (and the actual .com site is not ranking ANYWHERE).

Should I throw this .net site to my hosting account and create an index.html to forward to .com?

Any other ideas on how to get Google to rank the .com again instead of .net?

Thank you.

Katerina

[paulgl]

If you do a global 301 redirect from the .net to the .com it
will solve your problems. You have it forwarded now, the link
should not be broken. Any url associated with the domain should
go to the redirect. Forwarding actually.

It seems as if godaddy was not really parking the domain.
They must have had it show as an index.html page.
If that's the only thing there, google will try and crawl/index it.
Godaddy probably does this because they want their business
to show up in searches or what have you. Good business practice
on their end, but seems they are stealing "something".

It is better to do the 301 redirect, globally, from the .net to
the dot com. It will require developing the domain.

In fact, a funny thought occurred. Could you transfer the
dot com over to the dot net completely?

Anyway, have fun with and hope you get it on track.

Paul

[StrategicMarketingTN]

Thank you for your help. Yes, I could get the domain hosted on my account and do a 301 redirect.

The question is then, how would you proceed with SEO at this point?

Start trying to rank the .com from scratch (it does have a good number of backlinks but is nowhere in first 1000 results). Or give in to Google and try to rank the .net (which is purely redirected to .com at this point)?

Thanks

Katerina

[StrategicMarketingTN]

Just an update...

I put the .net on my server and did a 301 redirect to .com and Google got the message. All the previous rankings of .com are back on 1st page for all the keywords and .net is gone off results completely. Go figure....

Client stopped panicking... Me? Have no idea what happened, but happy that at least it worked out.

Katerina

[sporkmarketing]

No idea what happened, but your note about ".html" is interesting.

I've seen situations in my own work where google adds a "index.html" automatically to a URL during crawling...it's not something I see often, but it's come up a couple of times.

I think it makes sense: Google is trying to eliminate duplicate crawling to maximize efficiency, so it would be wise to test any given URI for a "index.html" file even if you didn't see one in the link...that would be a way to quickly eliminate a page of crawling.