I had a server crash and no backup. Killed all of my 30 sites. I want to keep the domains and build the new sites on a different server. These sites will be brand new. Will Google penalize me, when it can not find all of the old post url's that have already been indexed? Approx 20,000 posts, combined between all of the old sites. I just want to start over from scratch on all of the domain names, and I want to know if it will be worth the effort. Thanks for any input from those with plenty of experience in this area.
Woah I'm sorry to hear about that. What server were you using that they didn't use backups? Don't know the answer to your question but I wanted to know who to stay away from!
That sucks man! Google will probably penalize you initially but your sites may come out ranking better than before in a few months.
You won't be penalized. The domains still have their age, authority and incoming links. It's a much better place to start from than buying new domains. Did you have your server at a host? All reputable hosts provide backups automatically. Archive.org might be a good place to start to get your content back.
No, I thought I would try self hosting... No big loss though. (Just experimental aged domains that I have been working for about a year) They are only 30 out of hundreds of sites, on regular hosting accounts My big wonder, is: how google will react when It has 50,000 posts indexed and all of a sudden all of the links lead to "Page Not Found"? That is my main question... If that is the case, I will start building those sites again tomorrow. Thanks for all of the great replies folks,,, If there are more, I'd love to hear them.
Google Page Rank is only concerned with the amount of backlinks that your website is associated with. The only way you are going to get penalized is if you changed your domain name. You would lose your page rank. I lost a blog that had 5000 indexed pages. I rebuilt it and started to get some content built back up, got everything in order. Page Rank update came around and I was knocked to 0. However, a few days later it went back up to the original page rank. This tells me that it's the quality of your backlinks linking to your website that matters the most for page rank. There is something else I did though while rebuilding the website and creating some more content for it. For the 404 page that a user would get, I included a Google Search Box for the user and made the 404 page useful for the visitor to get them back on track and still use my website for what they were looking for. Read more about what Google expects by doing a search for "creating useful 404 pages" and it's the first result. Sorry I can't post links yet for ya or I would. I hope that you can recover and get everything straight. I'm hoping you can fix those broken pages, but if you can't then make your 404 pages useful to your visitor while your injecting some good and quick content. You never know, your websites might fully recover and do even better Good luck.
Wow. Sorry to hear about, um, your loss. I've kinda been there myself (though not as bad) and have learned the hard way that YOU NEED TO BACK YOUR STUFF UP!!§!§ I still mess around with that stuff sometimes, though - so thanks for the reminder to become stricter with back ups. I'd hate for something like that to happen right now...
You can use 301 redirects to redirect all your old pages - redirect them back to the domain so that you don't get penalized. It'll take time for your indexed pages to come back though. How come you didn't have any backups? Who was your server company?