Coming clean on domain ownership - Will I lose my ranking?

[Patrick Taylor]

I'm referring to a website on a domain with "Registration Private" (as displayed in whois). I'm proposing to change the registration details with the registrar so that they are no longer private but identify the owner in the normal fashion.

However, I've read that a change of domain ownership takes the site back to square one as far as Google is concerned - like starting afresh with a new domain.

Would my proposal have this effect, and lose current Google rankings? It isn't actually a change of ownership.

[Quadrille]

You have been misinformed.

If your content has not changed substantially, whois changes will have zero impact.

[Patrick Taylor]

Thanks. But do you mean that when a domain name changes ownership there is no effect on Google ranking of the site's pages (as long as the content is the same), or that changing a private registration to a public one is not the same as a change in ownership?

[Quadrille]

I don't think there's any doubt that Google could access whois data, but I've never seen a scintilla of evidece that they do - and certainly, there's no reason whatsover for them to do so EITHER for changing a private registration to a public OR a change in ownership.

Even if you happen to be someone who has had sites banned in the past, owning a clean site now would not be a problem for Google. They tend to look at the pages, not the owners. If the pages are OK, why would they look deeper? And if the pages are NOT ok, looking at whois would likely not make a lot of difference, would it?

I can see one use for whois, and thats when the investigation teamare trying to track down link networks ... but in my experience, the vast majority of them are so obvious that whois data would not be required; the algo would usually be more than enough.

There may be some of the "Google-on-the-Grassy-Knoll" brigade who will say different ... just ask them for any evidence, and they'll probably go away ;)