EP 12: Who Owns Your Digital Destiny?

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Last week, I was headed to the airport to speak at conference and I jumped on email to do a quick check before I loaded the car. Much to my surprise, I had a number of urgent emails from a long term client. Apparently, their website was gone. Content was nowhere to be found and they were wondering if they had been hacked.

I would normally say the website was down but that wasn’t the case. I said it was gone. As in poof and it completely disappeared. After some review, I could see my client was actually no longer in control of their domain or their website address. Their website address and domain was now owned by a third party. My stomach was immediately upset as I knew something was up and it wasn’t good.

I had been working with this client on SEO for six straight years. My design agency had built two custom websites for them and we’ve been supporting them on maintenance for what seems like forever. All the work, all that content and all that money was gone.

Can you see why I was immediately sick to my stomach? The domain was now owned and controlled by a third party company. It was routed to a server overseas and my client’s content was gone. I was speechless. I asked myself, “Did they not renew their domain?” It does happen. But these are smart people. So I was really surprised if that was the case.

These are the makings of a bad nightmare. Something I’d wake up from and I’d immediately be thankful that that strange dream wasn’t real life. But sadly, it was real life. This was no dream and no blasted nightmare. The company’s website was down and their corporate email was down as well. While we were able to get their website back up, it was a great lesson for business owners or it is a great lesson so much so that I wanted to take an episode and I wanted to talk about it.

My client’s company is full of very smart consultants. If they could make this mistake, so could others. So the lessons I want to give you is more of a question. I’d like to ask, who owns your digital properties and your destiny?

Now, let’s do a quick recap of my clients. A great deal of their new business and revenue comes from the web. Their offering has a long sales funnel and there are a variety of touch points that take place over the long period of what we call the customer journey. So even if a lead didn’t originate from the web, at some point on the journey to sale, the prospect will visit the internet and vet them and they will do this via their website.

Thus, the website is a critical part of their sales and marketing effort. Well really, the company can’t exist without it.

So now, let’s get to the root of the issue. How did my company completely lose ownership of their domain? How did their website completely go poof and all of the content disappear?

Apparently, someone in the organization decided to give ownership of their domain over to a third party, someone who I had never heard of before. It’s a small local shop with less than 20 people. It isn’t someone I know or even someone I would trust with one of my most important assets. Heck, I wouldn’t even trust them with my small assets.

My client’s domain has been around for about 20 years. It has lots of credibility with Google, lots of inbound links, and they bring in thousands and thousands of dollars each month in organic traffic. It has a huge amount of activity in the web. It is a major asset to them as a firm. They worked really hard to build it up and to work on both content and SEO over a very long timeframe.

So this means if a company was to actually lose their website and lose their domain, it would take them years and years to bring it back to where it was. It just would be impossible to do it quick because they have invested so much love and time in it. And which I might add, they did really lose it because it no longer existed and they no longer own it.

So in the eight years that I have owned and ran Web Savvy, I have always refused to register domains for clients. I would not even host websites for them because I want them to be fully independent. The fact that this third party asked for domain ownership floors me. It means they either don’t have the technical chops to see that it’s absolutely against best practice or worse yet, they just lack basic business ethics.

I probably sound upset and mad and disappointed, and that’s because I am. I worked really hard with this firm for years. Again, we’ve built them two websites. They’ve on a retainer with me since 2011 and I have spent every week of my life since 2011 working with them. And after all of that time, I would never have asked them to give me their most valuable asset. I would never take control over their domain or their website even though I’ve known them for that long and we’ve been working together for that long week after week.

So when I look up the domain now, I can still see that the third party owns it and they only register it for a year. This means in no time at all, we could be right back to the spot we’re at today. No website and no corporate email.

But worse yet, should something happen, it means a competitor could be hovering and they could buy the domain when it expires. That means they would have all of those inbound links and all of that history with Google that they could apply to their own sales, their own SEO, and their own link funnel.

It’s crazy, crazy, crazy. It’s absolutely how I feel about this situation. It has been a week and I’m still sick to my stomach over it. And it’s just not right because it never should have happened.

So I always like to give you takeaways and today is no different. I want to run through just a quick list of some lessons learned that I want to share with you because I really want to make sure that this situation never runs – you never run into it.

So first point is, always control your digital destiny. Never ever give ownership of your website or your domain to a third party. That means you need to register it. You need to renew your domain. Your website needs to be an independent platform that you have control over, not somebody’s multi-site in WordPress that you’re tied to, not a proprietary software. You need open source marketing software that can create a website for you and you control.

And I’m pushing that fact because I am working with a client, another client right now that is trying to free himself from the trap he has found himself in for years and can’t even tell his current web developer that we’re working on a new site. He fears him so much and the retribution that maybe coming from it. So that’s point number one.

Number two is you need to host your website and you need to not give it to your website developer. I know there’s a lot of website developers that will build the website and that will host it for you. Don’t do that. Stay independent.

Now, we offer monthly maintenance and support for websites but we always tell clients to have it on their hosting account. We have access to their hosting account but they control it. And they should.

Relationships can fail and if they do, you need to make sure that you can walk away with your goods and your hard work in hand.

Number three. When you register your domains, buy them for many years out. And if possible, set them up to autorenew. This way, you don’t have to worry about losing them to a stranger or worse yet, to your competitors.

Number four. Make sure you hire firms with good reputations and don’t simply hire somebody based on proximity to your physical office. I think this is what my client did and it’s a huge mistake.

I mean I’m looking at their website which is kind of cheesy with limited staff, limited expertise clearly based on the situation, yet, they picked them for some reason. And I suspect, it’s because they’re physically close to their office.

Number five. When you’re long-term SEO consultant goes all mama bear on you. You need to take note. She is not scolding you and following up with you on emails because she likes to treat you like a child. She is doing so because she is severely concern over the longevity of your website and your primary lead source. That is what I feel like right now.

I am in the position of again, to go mama bear on them because I can see they still haven’t regained control and they are not seeing the ramifications that can occur and that can happen should the relationship go south with this firm. And it’s just – it’s completely insane to me that it was done in the first place.

So I last spoke about this issue with my client on Wednesday. I was on the way to the airport and I knew my team was helping get their website back up quickly and I also knew it’s going to take a while for that domain ownership to get fixed. Well, it’s a week later. I just checked like I said and they still don’t own their domain. It’s still with the third party, which means the client still in jeopardy of losing their sales funnel, their leads, their revenue.

I have tried to explain that they are now held hostage by this firm that any time this firm could take down their website and corporate email. I mean like with the quick just – it takes 30 seconds for someone to go in and change the DNS and update the A records or the MX records. And as soon as that’s done in that 30 seconds, they lose control again.

A late payment, an angry conversation, a shift in service offering, a change over in personnel, or an unexpected firm closure could all be a cause for them losing their domain for good. You may think I’m exaggerating but I’m not.

I’m on social media a lot. I’m part of a lot of groups on Facebook. I have a lot of developer friends on Twitter. And I see developers rant on social media about their clients and I hear many stories of them taking the swift action to punish the client for bad behavior. As in they’d locked you out of the website. They’ve taken it down. They have updated your DNS. There are a lot weird things like that that happened. I have never done it. I would never do it. And it’s sad but it happens a lot.

If you are listening to this podcast, you care about your website and you care about internet marketing and your website traffic, since this is the case, you need to protect yourself and your digital assets. You need to stay independent and you need to own your destiny. I want you to remember my story and I want you to remember to stay in control.

If you ever questioned keeping your own domain control, where you’re going to host your website, what type of software you’re going to use for your website, remember this story. Maintain control, use open source software, and make sure you have independent relationship with a hosting company that is not your developer or anybody else that you’re relying on.

Thank you for joining me today. I look forward to chatting with you next week when we continue our SEO journey together.