SEO Concerns If Agency Threatens To Delete Your Site

Aug 19, 2021 - 7:31 am 3 by

Seo Threat

We have seen lots of SEO threats in the past, mostly around negative SEO but I have not seen one threaten to delete a whole website. Someone went to Twitter asking for advice from Google on how to deal with such a threat.

The agency that controls the site right now said if they switch to another agency, they will delete the site. The new agency asked Google "I can build a new website for the client and get all the content from the old website. But I'm a bit scared to make the client loose his SEO traffic. What would be your advice in this kind of case?"

Here are those tweets, so you see the full picture:

John Mueller from Google recommended that they download the site as is in static form and host it as a static site, just in case they do delete the site. Then rebuild it slowly, over time, and replace the static site once the new site is ready.

We don't know the whole story, maybe the client didn't fully pay the agency for the site and thus does not own it yet? I don't know but it is a terrible situation. Of course, if they did not pay for the site, then maybe there are legal issues with publishing a copy of the site?

Of course, SEO wise, cloning the site exactly would do the SEO trick. But legal wise, that is another story.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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