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Ask HN: In the age of domain squatters, how do I correctly retire my site?

5 points by pawadu ↗ HN
A very talented engineer I knew used to have a popular blog with some interesting projects. When he eventually got bored and shut the blog down, a cybersquatter bought it and created a spam-blog that looks exactly like the original site. His changes are subtle and it took me a few minutes to figure out that the latest post was not an honest review by the original author but an article paid by a company.

I am currently in the same situation, I have a mildly popular blog that also hosts some my FOSS projects. I plan to move everything to gitlab and shut down the blog. How can I make sure the old domain will not be an interesting target for cybersquatters? For example, can I get Google to reset my page rank?

4 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread
mulrian
Why not just squatt on the domain yourself? They are hardly expensive to keep nowadays,
samuellb
As long as there are still incoming links to the domain, I think it's hard to make Google reset it's page rank permanently. You could do a HTTP 301 permanent redirect and use Google Webmaster Tools to make Google point to the new GitLab site, but a squatter can always revert these changes so it will never be 100% effective.
pawadu
But if the incoming links are all 404, wont google eventually lower my pagerank?