Did First Scribe save .travel?

A prospective client approached us in August to help with some Google ranking issues. Apparently their website was indexed by Google to roughly 800 pages and then promptly plummeted to about 15 pages. Needless to say, they weren't ranking on any search terms and they were at their whits end as to a solution.

My initial thought is that they were spamming, duplicate content, fighting with a new algorithm, or just plain new.

Then I realized something I hadn't before. They had a one of the new .travel domain names. With a little research I found that all .travel sites were dealing with the same situation.

A search in Google for "site:.travel" returned 113,000 pages. When I clicked on the "cached" link next to any of the returns - each page had not been cached. As far as Google rankings were concerned, the pages didn't exist.

The same search for pages in Yahoo found zero pages.

No PageRank

On further inspection of their home page I found that the page would load fine but it didn't have a cache and no page rank. Not just zero page rank, but a grey bar. I haven't seen a grey bar in 2 or 3 years.

Note: A 0/10 PageRank in Google generally means that your website is of little importance to them. For the PageRank bar to be gray generally means that Google is not even indexing the home page of the site.

My advice to these folks was to buy a .com domain and forget about the .travel domain.

All .travel sites blocked?

As far as I could tell, none of the .travel sites had a page rank. Grey bar for all - no exceptions. None of the sites had cached pages in Google or Yahoo.

The Canada.travel site: http://www.canada.travel had no page rank, no cache. The tourism board of Canada was blocked...

What to do?

After 2 weeks of intense investigation, I let the client know that he was out of luck and he had 2 courses of action:

1. Buy a .com domain and start over.
2. Contact Google directly and ask them to fix the problem.

Big Choices

The client obviously had some clout in the industry (and a great deal of budget invested in the new domain name) because they opted for #2. Turns out they are on speaking terms with Ronald N. Andruff, President & CEO of Tralliance Corp.

Tralliance Corp. was the sole purveyor of .travel domains and is a real company. (I.e. They don't appear to be a fly-by-night organization.)

Mr. Andruff emailed Vinton G. Cerf at Google directly. Mr. Cerf is Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist of Google. From my perspective, he is the top of the food chain and by all accounts a really nice man.
http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint


It couldn't be Google's problem - Please go away.

At this point I was very politely assured that I was mistaken.

Of course, I wasn't mistaken so we continued the pressure.

After another round of assurance that we were quite correct, Google conceded that the .travel was not being cached and engineering looked into the problem and subsequently fixed the problem.

Yahoo has yet to recognize .travel.