iLife forum: Apple ends Mobile Me and Leaves Page Rank Hanging

I have been a Mac user since I was 5 years old (I am now 29). I have loved and used Mac products the entire way, but I know that sometimes they take a while to work out the kinks in new ideas. That's the way innovation is sometimes.

Their latest innovation is the iCloud service, which replaced among other things the Mobile Me service. Part of the Mobile Me service was an easy interface with their application called iWeb with which one more familiar with Powerpoint than HTML could create and publish websites. This is how I had done my website and developed a web presence for the last 7 years (5 years on the web.mac.com URL).

On July 31, Apple closed Mobile Me and erased all files from those accounts, along with them any websites that were stored on Mobile Me. This is supposed to be an improvement in service to the new iCloud service. However, the benefits of this service did not justify the costs and so I have moved my website, previously on web.mac.com, to another hosting service.

The real problem is that the files are transferred BUT THE PAGE RANK IS NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE RESTRICTED ACCESS TO THE ORIGINAL WEB.MAC.COM URL! This is a big problem.

It's only about three weeks since this change went into effect and I hope that many other people who made their personal sites, their businesses, their blogs, etc. vent their frustration with Apple over this short-sighted transition plan.

As a short-term solution, at least allow former users of web.mac.com to upload a 301 redirect file to their original web.mac.com websites so that they can transfer their webs history to the new URL. This should require almost no effort on the side of Apple.

This was a big screwup, guys, and Apple Support today could only tell me that they "had not thought of that" when I confronted them with this problem. Their solution was to register a complaint, so here I am and I urge you to do the same.

If people are going to build their lives around Apple then the least they can do is figure out a way to maintain that for their customers. The behavior exhibited by this lack of engineering foresight is uncharacteristic, regrettable and, I hope, fixable.