Unfortunate story. It wasn't clear to me that the .online TLD led to Google blacklisting the site. Why did you think that was connected?
Never buy a .online domain
21–30 of 513 posts
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#22Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.
This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#23One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
By adding your site to there you can get data on how many clicks & impressions your site received on google, what keywords it ranks for etc.
You can also request Google to index your site on GSC as well.
You should probably add your websites to GSC.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#24I don’t know that the advice is solid in terms of never buying an alternate TLD.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#25One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
https://search.google.com/search-console/about. Yes. It gives you options in cases as described here.
Was called webmastertools before.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#26One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
Can't answer if you should add them or not...
But if you do - you would get some notifications from Google about that website/domain.
I've only ever seen emails of the "There's an increase in 4xx/5xx errors on site/page(s)"
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#27Google have way too much power to mess people's lives up. Especially for an organisation with basically zero customer support.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#28Enshittification at its peak (or is it at its peak already?)
There is no peak, because it's a hole, and we can always dig deeper.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#29One conclusion is: > Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
If it's already in the Console when it gets blacklisted, you can appeal it without having to 'verify' ownership of the domain that, in this case, you no longer control the DNS of, because you completed that process when adding it to Console.
Re: Never buy a .online domain
#30The .com purist advice is sound but you're not getting four-letter domain names that way, and in some ccTLD zones you can still. I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them al…
Yeah, what the heck happened to Gandi? It used to be my go-to, but nowadays... yikes!
Private equity cancer, same as Namecheap.