Hide domain information using private registration

negative or not?

[lakr]

Dear all,

My domains are registered using private registration service via domain by proxy (DBP) in order to protect the domains from hacking attempts.

what do you think about this matter when DBP provides this service for a lot of domains, and will Google think that DBP is a spammer to their index if my competitors also use this service?

Thanks, and Happy Christmas to all.

Lakr

[ronin100]

I have the same question - wanted a notification if anyone answers - thanks for posting!

[chrisv1963]

Don't use a private registration service.
Google's logic: If you want to hide your identity, something is not right.
Use domain lock to protect your domain names.

[Simsi]

Personally I wouldn't have thought they'd care. There are perfectly legitimate uses for private whois as you rightly point out and Google has access to all the Whois info for each domain anyway, so they have better ways of deciding if sites are worth penalising.

[tedster]

This is something Matt and Adam have both discussed. The gist of the answers I've heard is that on its own, there's no problem with private or anonymous registration. Certainly there are very practical and innocent reasons for using this kind of service.

Only if private registration gets coupled with other signs of potential shady dealings does it send a negative signal to Google.

[potentialgeek]

Google has confirmed it checks domain whois records. A lot of people will find this surprising, because in the past it only took its data from crawling sites. Whois monitoring is "off-site" spying and I'm not thrilled about it.

I think Matt said one issue is volume. If you have many domains with whois privacy, they'll get suspicious. That and what Ted said. They probably think a multi-domain owner is the profile of a spammer (even though it's not always true).

Verbatim:

"Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so."

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006/11/page/2/

If I want to build new sites, I'd prefer to avoid spam with whois privacy. I'd also prefer to have them on the same server because it's cheaper and site management is faster/easier. Who wants to have to find a different host for every new site and pay extra!?

If Google spies on your whois records, it may also spy on your IP address... if you have many domains with whois and they're all on the same server and they all link to one another, Google algo says, "We found a link farm."

See also:
Matt Cutts On Having Lots Of Sites! At PubCon
[webmasterworld.com...]

Don't forget, too, Google has Reverse Lookup with Adsense. Most multi-domain owners are probably not businesses, just publishers using Adsense/equivalent service that has an account id which shows up in page code.

So they don't even need to check whois records or consult the Adsense dept to find spammers/junk sites.

p/g