Lost mysite.com! Bought mysite.net, what now?

Did you miss just one email?

I typically get two or three emails leading up to an expiration, as well as at least one that will let me reclaim it before it goes into the drop cycle.

I hate to say it, but you really screwed up. If they don't feel charitable, you have no recourse. Pay the extortion and get your site back.

It has to be worth it with page one rankings out there. I would move quickly.

That's how it goes with the domains. I've lost one when my first son was born, but it was still in the limbo with the registrar (grace period or whatever), so I only had to pay maybe $150-200 to get it back. German Joker ran their own little extortion racket back in the day at least...

Mr. Gordon makes a good point above.

If you're not willing to pay the price and have no legal recourse (they're cyber squatting, but you still might not have any way of grabbing the domain) using the new domain might be the best you can do.

I think every registrar I have ever used has this awesome setting for domains called 'auto-renew'.

I would suggest that if a domain is important to you, enable it.

The owner responded by email and said that the price is set by an algorithm and furthermore that "our client does not negotiate." I don't get that... who is "his client?" The guy that wrote me, his last name is the same as his domain, so, I assume that he is the owner. He offered to let me pay 3 payments for the large amount and also said that the alternative is to wait, the price may change. Might go up, might go down, he said.

I just checked my leads from this site and it's probably not worth spending any money on. Even though it has great SERP, for some reason, people are not contacting me much through it, some of my other sites get far more leads. But I have links on this site to some of my other sites, so, people could be hitting this site and navigating to one of my other sites and then contacting me. Occupying a first page SERP does have definite value, as it keeps a competitor off the first page. But, I think I will just let it go if he won't take a reasonable price. If I could get it back, I would make some changes to get better lead response. I have quite a few sites in this narrow niche, I guess I will just work on bumping up another of my second page SERP sites to, hopefully, first page SERP.

I wouldn't count on getting the old domain back. If it happens, fine but don't expect a miracle.

Change all your links to the new .net domain today. If you own the majority of decent backlinks pointing at the .com backlink profile you might be able to get the .com back If the seller finds out all backlinks he thought he had are now toast.

Go ahead & start optimizing the .net domain.

You just need to ask if the price they're paying is worth it (e.g. how long would it take for the revenue you used to generate from the site to cover the cost you have to pay them unfortunately)

If it's not worth it (you need to set your own judgement here), then yes, just repoint them to your new .net site.

I wrote the squatter again and told him that yes, the site has some traffic but does not result in much income at all to me (I looked at my stats) and I would need to improve it if I could get it back to result in more sales, and I offered him a reasonable fee (in my mind). He simply said, "It's not negotiable."

I have been back to the listing for mysite.com and it keeps going down in price. I don't know if the reduction will accelerate but it has gone down a bit every day. At this rate, it might take a month, even two, for it to get down to where I would pay it.

I will work on the .net for now, assuming I will not get the .com back. Thanks for all advice.

http://www.openlinkprofiler.org can help you to read all the links, its not as good as href but atleast its free.