Is my .org penalised because of foreign spam .com?

[great_9]

Is it possible for mydomain.org to be penalised because of foreign mydomain.com?

I wanted to register mydomain.com also, but a spammy Cayman-Island company used some kind of back-order so they were the first :(

The subject on their domainname is different and it's indexed in google. (title, not only the url).

It's filled with ads, no real content. (don't know how to call sites like this).

If my domain is penalised because of that, what actions can I take? They don't respond to emails and the phone number is fake... It expires in 1 and a half year :(

[mcavill]

personally i'd guess not - if the sites are unrelated; links, whois etc - I've got a .org version of a .com that is URL only and just meta refreshes to another site. My .org has ranked well for a few years (but got hit with the Sept 22nd thing last year).

You could try a domain backorder if you want to try and grab the domain when it comes up for renewal.

[tedster]

You know, up until the last week I would have been 100% in agreement with mcavill. Even though I understand that a pure Hilltop algo would mark these domains as affiliated, I never saw any crossed wires in the real world. Until last week.

One SERP I've been watching since before Brett invented the acronym itself has just been invaded by a totally off-topic stranger. The only reason I can see for this domain to be there is the domain token before the tld (.com) is identical to the identically spelled .org authority site for the keyword. There's no linking between them, and not even the presence of the keyword itself on the .com -- and the topics are widely divergent.

So apparently something on the back end of google currently can tangle up an identical .com and .org, even with no other relationship between the sites.

I really doubt there would be a PENALTY here. At least I've never seen that so far, and I certainly hope not. Great_9, you did not mention any specific evidence of a penalty -- is there any?

[great_9]

Yes tedster, although I am not 100% sure.
I've checked every single publicly known "no-no" and nothing seems to be the problem why I'm so far low the serps. 160k pages in results for site:mydomain.org, real number above 80k. inbound link are around couple of hundred. I've wrote it all in another post.
PR through the site is good. Ranges from PR2 to PR6.

Oh yeah, another thing. Before the spammy .com was registered by that cayman island company I was getting 3 times the traffic that I'm getting now with 20% of the content I have now.

Maybe it's a coincidence and maybe it's a new way to crush your competitor.

[Stefan]

So apparently something on the back end of google currently can tangle up an identical .com and .org, even with no other relationship between the sites.

Yikes. Thanks for the heads-up, Tedster. I might take care of things now to prevent future problems.

[tedster]

Update -- the weirdness I was seeing only lasted a few days. The "crossed wires" appear to be fixed today.

[Stefan]

The "crossed wires" appear to be fixed today.

All the same, better safe than sorry in case they get crossed again. If the other main tld versions of one's .org are available (.com at least), maybe it's best to grab them.