By: Dezmon Landers

What would you do if your site was stolen and held for ransom? David Airey had built a blog, and more importantly a brand with his website that was also instrumental to his consulting business. Due to a security flaw in Gmail David’s domain name, DavidAirey.com was stolen, and with it all the link and site equity that he had built over the years.

David quickly restructured his blog at davidairey.co.uk, while it is positive, is still lost with all links pointing to the original domain. The original domain is on the first page of Google for the term logo designer (lets try to get the new site there) which is a major achievement. The story quickly flooded the blogosphere and was even picked up by the New York Times.

This story does has a happy ending as Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy) saw the story and helped return davidairey.com back to David (currently being forwarded to davidairey.co.uk).

This is an important alert that you need to back up all your files and databases as well as dont use free email accounts to conduct business.