IT TURNS OUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT WHEN I PAID GOOGLE TO RENEW THE SITE, THEY NEVER REALLY DID. OR DID SO LATE. ANYWAY THE DOMAIN WENT ON GODADDY AFTERMARKET THE WHOLE AND WAS ON THE WHOLE TIME WITHOUT MY KNOWLEDGE FOR THE PAST MONTH. NO ONE CONTACTED ME ABOUT THIS AND I HAD NO ADMIN SCREEN TO TELL ME. THE DOMAIN WAS RECENTLY SOLD ON THE GREEDY GODADDY AFTERMARKET FOR 107 DOLLARS. I AM IN THE PROCESS OF EITHER BUYING IT BACK AND CONTACTING GODADDY. (PAYING A 65 DOLLAR BROKER FEE)

as I post from a WordPress hosted blog…

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It all started when I started my little arts and culture blog on blogger, http://www.thegonzojournal.blogspot.com, I was a freelance journalist in my spare time, writing on issues ranging from technology to the art. Eventually I wanted cultivate my own media outlets one of these was a culture blog I started on blogspot http://www.thegonzojournal.blogspot.com. I started getting a ­lot of traffic and people really liked my writing, so I decided to spring for a custom domain address. It would cost ten dollars and as long as I set it up through the backend of the Blogger Dashboard, Google would handle everything for me. Google would purchase the domain from Godaddy and act as the middleman while giving me no access to the server settings of a usual Godaddy account. They would simply point the nameservers for the domain to the blogspot servers I figured this would be a sure way to keep what Pagerank I already had. All I had to do was type the desired address in a little input field. “Wow this couldn’t be better or easier I thought.”

Things went very nice for a year, I had the advantage of not worrying about my large database of blog posts and Google handled everything with 99% uptime; my site started getting recognized and had lots of inbound links and great SEO value. This all changed when it came time to renew my domain. I procrastinated until about 2 or three days before my domain would expire, I did not think this would be a big problem. I paid for two years this time around and everything went through, with a receipt from Google. The Whois information was updated to having my domain expire in 2010 and everything else on Whois stayed the same, I was registered through Godaddy/Domains by Proxy. Unfortunately it must have taken the Google team a while to process that I made the payment and the page started redirecting to one that said “this page parked free by Google Apps.” I could then and even now can still log into the backend of my Blogger dashboard and access, update and edit my blog posts. Shortly after I got this first warning sign, I got contacted by a person asking to buy my domain, apparently it had been placed on a watch list of available high pagerank (PR 4) domains by Godaddy. I resubmitted the site, filled out a contact form to Google and whether this did anything or not my site was back up in a few days. Webmaster tools gave no indication that anything was wrong at any point in this process showing all paged indexed.

Phase 2 of the problem started when the site stopped showing up in Google, (see help link here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=41bd8853577bd706&hl=en) this only lasted for one day but it told me something was still going on with the hosting. The next day I was back in the SERP’s and ranking great as usual, this went on for another week until my site was down again. First it gave the ubiquitous “This Page has Been Parked Free by Godaddy,” then a few hours later it would redirect to the default search engine page by my host Roadrunner, “Sorry we can not find this page.” I checked the Blogger dashboard and under the little input field where I get to type in my custom domain, it read…

“The DNS record for your domain is not set up correctly yet. If you just purchased this domain the set up process may take up to a day.”

This is when I knew that DNS hijacking had taken place. The next day my New York city music blog for all the eccentric techies, freaks and artists in New York was redirected to a one page spam site. I picked up on something suspicious when I looked at Google Analytics for the time period that my site was de-indexed from Google. The only visits to my blog were coming from a “site:” command somewhere in India. There was nothing I could do, I had given up my life and soul to the great cloud computer in the sky run, run by what I thought was the ironclad braniac team of Google. I have no access to FTP, server settings or DNS, Google handled all of that for me through Godaddy. I only hope that when Matt Cutts gives his presentations at WordCamp on why we should blog, encouraging us all to start up blogging, that he cares enough about his company’s own blogging software and security. Or maybe this is why he uses WordPress? My only hope is that I get this message to someone at Google to take a look at the DNS settings and problems on their stealth servers, as it would be hard to know which server to redirect back to in the first place even if I could Hijack the NS records myself. I still believe Google is one of the best companies ever, besides it’s too late to turn back now. Google If you can read this SEND HELP!

trying to contact Google through any of this has been futile, i have spent hours scouring for contact information on phone, email, and support ticket forms,

It all started when I started my little arts and culture blog on blogger, http://www.thegonzojournal.blogspot.com, I was a freelance journalist in my spare time, writing on issues ranging from technology to the art. Eventually I wanted cultivate my own media outlets one of these was a culture blog I started on blogspot http://www.thegonzojournal.blogspot.com. I started getting a ­lot of traffic and people really liked my writing, so I decided to spring for a custom domain address. It would cost ten dollars and as long as I set it up through the backend of the Blogger Dashboard, Google would handle everything for me. Google would purchase the domain from Godaddy and act as the middleman while giving me no access to the server settings of a usual Godaddy account. They would simply point the nameservers for the domain to the blogspot servers I figured this would be a sure way to keep what Pagerank I already had. All I had to do was type the desired address in a little input field. “Wow this couldn’t be better or easier I thought.” Things went very nice for a year, I had the advantage of not worrying about my large database of blog posts and Google handled everything with 99% uptime; my site started getting recognized and had lots of inbound links and great SEO value. This all changed when it came time to renew my domain. I procrastinated until about 2 or three days before my domain would expire, I did not think this would be a big problem. I paid for two years this time around and everything went through, with a receipt from Google. The Whois information was updated to having my domain expire in 2010 and everything else on Whois stayed the same, I was registered through Godaddy/Domains by Proxy. Unfortunately it must have taken the Google team a while to process that I made the payment and the page started redirecting to one that said “this page parked free by Google Apps.” I could then and even now can still log into the backend of my Blogger dashboard and access, update and edit my blog posts. Shortly after I got this first warning sign, I got contacted by a person asking to buy my domain, apparently it had been placed on a watch list of available high pagerank (PR 4) domains by Godaddy. I resubmitted the site, filled out a contact form to Google and whether this did anything or not my site was back up in a few days. Webmaster tools gave no indication that anything was wrong at any point in this process showing all paged indexed. Phase 2 of the problem started when the site stopped showing up in Google, (see help link here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=41bd8853577bd706&hl=en) this only lasted for one day but it told me something was still going on with the hosting. The next day I was back in the SERP’s and ranking great as usual, this went on for another week until my site was down again. First it gave the ubiquitous “This Page has Been Parked Free by Godaddy,” then a few hours later it would redirect to the default search engine page by my host Roadrunner, “Sorry we can not find this page.” I checked the Blogger dashboard and under the little input field where I get to type in my custom domain, it read… “The DNS record for your domain is not set up correctly yet. If you just purchased this domain the set up process may take up to a day.” This is when I knew that DNS hijacking had taken place. The next day my New York city music blog for all the eccentric techies, freaks and artists in New York was redirected to a one page spam site. I picked up on something suspicious when I looked at Google Analytics for the time period that my site was de-indexed from Google. The only visits to my blog were coming from a “site:” command somewhere in India. There was nothing I could do, I had given up my life and soul to the great cloud computer in the sky run, run by what I thought was the ironclad braniac team of Google. I have no access to FTP, server settings or DNS, Google handled all of that for me through Godaddy. I only hope that when Matt Cutts gives his presentations at WordCamp on why we should blog, encouraging us all to start up blogging, that he cares enough about his company’s own blogging software and security. Or maybe this is why he uses WordPress? My only hope is that I get this message to someone at Google to take a look at the DNS settings and problems on their stealth servers, as it would be hard to know which server to redirect back to in the first place even if I could Hijack the NS records myself. I still believe Google is one of the best companies ever, besides it’s too late to turn back now. Google If you can read this SEND HELP!