SEO Concerns If Agency Threatens To Delete Your Site

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:

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 trafic. What would be your advice in this kind of case ? Have a nice day 🍌

— Mr.Renard (@his_arthur) August 10, 2021

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.

That sounds like a pretty terrible web agency, it seems like a good idea to leave. A simple approach is to mirror the site to static hosting, and then rebuild it step by step. That way the content & URLs remain, SEO keeps working, and you have more time to do a clean transition.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 10, 2021

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?

I can't give legal advice, and it sounds like it's a unique & bad situation. Maybe you can make recommendations to the client and let them handle the non-web aspect of the decision?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 10, 2021

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

Forum discussion at Twitter.