Privacy Domains and Guilt By Association

[Spine]

I was thinking today that I might use the privacy feature my registrar offers for whois info. You know the deal, my name is still showing up on whois checks, but my contact address and email are listed with info belonging to my registrar.

It occurred to me, what if a few (or a bunch) of spammers or other 'black hat' domains are also taking advantage of this service from the same registrar? I assume the names would be different, but would having this 'privacy' address in common still potentially get one in trouble with the bigger SEs?

That is of course assuming that the SEs use whois for anything. I'm seeing my site ranking higher on google.ca, and I'm wondering if it's the whois info causing that.

[qazwer]

As far as I know, SEs do not use whois info. I have registered thousands of names over the years and with the idle names nothing was indexed (No NSs were assigned). As far as your concerns about being affiliated with spammers or whatever when you use the privacy option... Well if that were the case you would have read something about that in the news a long time ago. I would however suggest you use ICANN accredited registrars, some of them use code generated privacy cloaking.

www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html

[uncle_bob]

Some search engines do use details of newly registered domains to find new sites to index (such as inktomi), while others only use links to find websites (such as google) .

I doubt however that engines like inktomi are using whois, more likely they get a feed of newly registered domains either from registrar or root-nameserver companies.