All right since Matt Cutt’s and I are well on our way to be being best friends (as is clearly shown in the picture to the right of him telling me jokes) I think it’s ok to ask the question that’s on everybody’s mind regarding the site review session, can Google see behind a private registration, and what are some general-ish guidelines about owning multiple domains people should keep in mind. I ask the question on behalf of all the people who aren’t in your list of blackhat SEO blogs and want to keep out of it. Sometimes it’s better to light a candle than to have people wander around in the dark.
OK fine all that stuff about us being best friends is well pretty much made up, and I shamelessly stole the pictures from Marshall Clark’s blog
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I heard you guys got into it pretty bad! Just peek at my latest blog entry
yeah that session scared me, I have read they cache the whois when the domain is new so when you apply whois guard its a little late… tiem for domains by proxy, fake whois and all that jazz.
I never bothered hiding my sites and I still made plenty of money. I dunno why you guys are so worried about it
G-Man
I love the way some issues need to stew for a week or two before they get blogged. This was “the big thing” for pubcon IMHO. I, too have a thought post I haven’t put up yet. Still stewing.
I would not be surprised if Matt’s secret tool was simply whois w/archive, reverse IP, and Google Knowledge rolled into one database. Same stuff we use, sans the Google info. It’s enough to do what I’ve seen so far.
Agree with John. There are about 5-10 easily available (for google) bits of data that combined with what he mentioned that would make this pretty easy for them to identify in most cases.
Well if you use some of the better whois tools they don’t start fetching your info before you make a query.
So make a whois query then apply the protection you’re exposed. However apply the protection then the query and you’re good. That is of course assuming you allow it time to propagate.
Just got done reading another blog post about profiling in regards to that same session – and about private registrations: http://blog.auinteractive.com/is-google-profiling-website-owners
A lot of people missed this I think, in regards to it being a point that should have been addressed.
Domain Tools has a whois history checker that goes back to 2001.
http://domain-history.domaintools.com/?q=google.com&page=results
Seems to me that the only way to guarantee a private registration in the eyes of the SEs is to go private from the very start as they surely track this data as well (at the very least for manual reviews).
Greg right but it only goes out and gets the data if somebody looks for it, it doesn’t get it automatically everytime anyone registers a new domain.
Yep I’m with you Rae lot’s of people didn’t catch it at the time. However more and more people are starting to wonder, seems to me to be an opportunity to nip it in the bud if it’s false.
My domains have private registrations simply because I didn’t want people having my home address when I registered them. Personal privacy often mirrors what spammers do and it is only troubling if Google gets it wrong. So far, I do not see any negative signs, but I use sitemaps and am not affraid to show what is in my wallet to anyone. In fact, I want to show it all to Google to continue to have positive organic results.
G-man – you “used” to not worry but it is a new day old man. ;o)
At the session, it wasn’t clear what Matt Cutts had looked at. For all we knew, there were backlinks or Google web master registrations in place for the noted additional domains.
I still don’t know.
It’s correct that it wasn’t clear what Matt Cutts did at the session. But as I’ve posted a couple of places this could be done by anyone! For that specific domain which Matt looked up anyone can create list of the other domains Matt mentioned.
The steps are simple… Check domains on surrounding ip’s with a reverse-ip tool. You’d notice that the domains are alike. It only takes seconds before you’re adding domains to the list… Also, by checking the ip you’d see that the entire C block is assigned to the owner of the domains… No voodoo just a simple approach!
What difference does it make when you put the same Adsense code on all of the sites?
Anyone can proxy domain registrations – the public data would be just as hidden. Why would the large proxy registrars play game with companies like Google? Google certainly has more tools and access to the complete domain history, but how would they gain access to the client information from the proxy registrars? If Google can get the private data from Proxy-Registrar-A, wouldn’t Proxy-Registrar-B market their “complete” privacy as an advantage?
If they all share data, I’ll open up a private-private registrar in Switzerland with guaranteed no records.
I did some research and from what I can tell, Google does not actually have access to private domain registration information after all. This is assuming the domain in question has had privacy protection from inception, and not added later, as I would assume G would have cached information to compare/refer to.
I posted details and links to where I got my info at “Google cannot see past private registrations”
Even if they don’t have God-like access to registration information, the implication that they are profiling webmasters is still disturbing.
Of course they profile webmasters — how else can they figure out what to tell them when they ask “why isn’t my darling site ranking?” (”darling site”=one of 5000 amazon affiliate shops he’s running)
softplus, I’m not really with you there. I can’t say if they profiling webmasters or not. But if it so then they either suck at it or they don’t take it into account when removing spam.
When I’ve had sites manually banned they only take one site at a time even though I had multiple sites that they should ban. And these are sites which are fully connected e.g. same registration, ip, template, adsense and/or affiliate id and the sites are visibly interlinked.
I think that Google is profiling Webmasters. Partly for spam control and partly for click fraud prevention. Even Alexa keeps track of “other sites owned” (though probably a much simpler system than what Google is capable of).
I don’t think that Google can see behind private registrations if you have registered with private registration from the beginning. They have many other ways that they can connect your sites though.
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