Looks Like Google Deindexed the CO.CC Subdomains

[Terabytes]

Looks like all those subdomains of co.cc have been removed from the index...

It's about time! :)

[tedster]

Absolutely zero indexed results for site:co.cc - that's a pretty thorough wipeout.

[falsepositive]

Thank goodness. I kept seeing those pop up as scrapers! Wonderful news.

[lucy24]

Poor Cocos Islands! How are they supposed to earn a living when internet gambling is getting squashed all over the place, they're not a big enough name to attract offshore corporations, and now they can't even sell phony domains?

:: sobbing brokenly ::

[arikgub]

True, most co.cc sites are spam. But removing ALL co.cc sites from index is like removing the entire blogspot.com just because 90% of its subdomains are junk

[supercyberbob]

Time to remove blogspot.com from the index then.

And all keyword domains. Oh wait, that's in the works. Kinda. Not deindexing, but less juice. I think.

Cutts said it somewhere, so it must be true.

[chrisv1963]

Time to remove blogspot.com from the index then

I agree. That would save me a lot of time (more than 50 DMCAs for Blogspot per week).

Advice to Google: charge a monthly fee for Blogspot usage and 99% of the spam will dissappear.

[courier]

And all keyword domains. Oh wait, that's in the works. Kinda. Not deindexing, but less juice. I think.

I have heard this is in the pipeline, but what about the people like myself - domain name = company name live for 10 years - over the past 8 years the domain name has become a keyword domain, which is now one of the most fiercely fought for keywords in my sector after it was hit upon as a cost saving measure in the press. Surely I am not expected to change my company and domain to suit this change in search patterns.

[deadsea]

Courier: I might cash out on your valuable company name. Consider it a windfall, and start something new that is again more brandable. Hope that it happens again. :-)

I love my domain names a lot, but I'm hoping I wouldn't be so stubborn as the utube.com folks. Another holdout I remember was googol.com. They could have made some easy money, but now it looks like they just let it expire.

[Freedom]

I have a feeling it's not going to be a full onslaught against "keyword domains." Having more than 1 dash in it, and anything that is not .com or .org, and subdomains, is guaranteed to be in trouble. But I don't think they are going to devalue something like cellphones dot com - or similar, just because it's a word in the dictionary.

On the other hand, Google has been playing deer hunter (Christopher Walken scene) and losing a lot lately. 2011 is the year they &^%$ off everybody, even their own employees and departments, and several governments, including the US, and nearly every webmaster on the planet.

When they *&^% off Wall Street, investors, bond rating agencies, and sector analysts, well, then,

the bullet hits the brain.

[limoshawn]

I'm with Freedom on this one, I see no reason in the world to devalue exact match domains, parked website, sure and I think they already are, but to spank a site just because seems silly. exact match domains have a great value if they are developed properly, just like any other domain.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Ahh the eb and flow. Today...

keyword-keyword-vegas-keyword-easy.com = bad.
keyword.com = <> likely receiving unfair ranking treatment already.
keyword-nonkeyword.com = good
personal-name = excellent
hoobleydumpkins type of made up domain name = the best

But who knows about 10 years from now. It seems that whatever the 'main' webmaster population does becomes a baseline and those on the fringes get promoted unfairly or judged harshly.

Go with an exact match domain name or something entirely made up and you'll receive the biggest reward, along with the biggest risk, and you can enjoy the flow. If you instead aim for the mainstream domain name you have less risk but will receive less fringe benefits as well.

[lqyromeo]

LOL, i am very sad to hear that, why don't index the co.cc domain.

[walkman]

This explains a lot for Google. Lately, IMO, they have shown much less care for collateral damage.

Those applauding should remember this thread: next might be the same subnet, same host, same country or similar business model sites.
All gone, in one shot. Unless you use Google services of course.

It's one thing for Blekko with 0.X% market share to do and it's another for Google with 65%-95% market share to do. I hope they complain to FTC about this.

[AlyssaS]

^^^ seriously?

First of all, .co.cc isn't a TLD. .cc is the TLD. .co.cc was a single website that was selling subdomains and not bothering to check whether malware and other nasties were being hosted on their servers. Despite several warnings from G.

This isn't about having spammy content or junk located on their site, but Malware.

Facebook banned posting .co.cc links several months back for that reason.

I saw one report that said that the .co.cc had about 50,000 malware sub-domains, which is astonishing. Most providers of free sub-domains don't have a fraction of that, because they take down sites immediately.

I really doubt that the FTC will rap G for taking down ONE domain that was encouraging malware suppliers.

G has actually been really considerate to them, giving them warnings in advance and advising individual webmasters that if their felt their particular sub-domain was legit they should submit it for reconsideration. That's more consideration than Facebook offered.

I know you hate G, but knee-jerk support for anyone opposed to them just puts you on the side of real criminals in this case.

[walkman]

I know you hate G, but knee-jerk support for anyone opposed to them just puts you on the side of real criminals in this case.

Wow, just wow! Maybe Google should ban the entire Nigerian domains /email along with the Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Romanian or whatever. If you say no, you must be on the side of real criminals in this case because many scams /scam site are based there. Like that logic now?

And it's not knee-jerk, it's based on principles. I was and I'm against Blekko as well that banned 1 million domains, just like that, in one shot. This is a horrible precedent, no matter how you spin it, especially with a SE with this much market share.

More than just criminals had sites there: [google.com...] and it's for more than malware. Read it from Matt Cutts:

"if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole."

Edit: Someone suggested doing a "student site:co.cc" on yahoo, apparently it was quite popular with students, student groups and even certain third world country schools. Watch out .info domain owners :)

And I don't 'hate Google,' I hate the Taliban and the likes :). I use plenty of Google services every single day and make decent money with adsense and with traffic from Google.

But, yeah I am not a big fan of Panda and how it was handled.

[AlyssaS]

^^ As you are perfectly aware, they haven't banned the .cc TLD at all (which would be akin to banning all nigerian, Ukranian, Chinese and Romanian domans).

They have banned a SINGLE DOMAIN, co.cc, which was selling subdomains to malware distributors and making no attempt to police what they had on their servers.

Google has deindexed lots of individual domains that broke their TOS. Why so worked up about this one? Why do you assume that the FTC will act to protect this domain (with it's malware infestation), given that it hasn't thought it necessary to intervene on other domains that have fallen foul of G's TOS for lesser infringements?

Other subdomain providers like cu.cc and cz.cc are still up. But I guess they are working harder to police their servers, and G has given them a pass.

The analogy with .info is completely OTT.

.info is a TLD, and as has been pointed out, G has NOT banned the .cc TLD at all, just ONE .cc site - co.cc.

[lucy24]

Oh, wait, I'm missing something. How can .co.cc be a single domain when .cc is a country? Wouldn't that be like saying everything in .co.uk is the same domain?

[AlyssaS]

^^ the country reference is .cc see

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Most of their domains are of the keyword.cc nature.

The providers of the subdomain service cleverly chose the name co.cc as it looks a bit like some other tlds. But it was a SINGLE domain, and they were selling sub-domains to spammers and malware providers.

Other .cc domains are still working. And other subdomain providers like cu.cc and cz.cc are still in operation.

All G has done is deindex ONE domain, owned by a company that was busily minting it selling subdomains to malware distributors and not responding to warnings about cleaning up their operation. In effect it's a bit like the other deindexations G has done - that domain was violating G's TOS.

[walkman]

@AlyssaS
You are missing the much bigger point. Google has technically banned ONE domain but in reality banned many tens of thousands of totally innocent sites in addition to spam ones. Same if you ban blogger.com: it's one domain, but you nuke millions (?) of sites, yet probably several thousand of them aren't spam ;). So it's a question of fairness and culpability. Not to mention that Google raised the stakes with "spam or low quality." WT* does that mean? Google just told everyone that if you get a free blog on a platform that has "a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality" your blog /free site will/could be gone too.

Banning Russia and .cn site was a rhetorical question.

[anteck]

Now that Alyssa cleared this up (it's only the subdomains of co.cc) it makes sense. I could never imagine google wiping out a whole TLD.

[graeme_p]

Oh, wait, I'm missing something. How can .co.cc be a single domain when .cc is a country? Wouldn't that be like saying everything in .co.uk is the same domain?

Some countries allow you to register domains immediately under the country code. You cannot register example.uk*, but you can register example.ly or example.im or example.lk. You usually pay a premium for two letter domains (i.e. to get xx.xx)

*parliament.uk is an apparent exception, but a whois says it is a TLD, so the actual domain is www.parliament.uk - which is presumably why they cannot redirect parliament.uk to www.parliament.uk.

[flatfile]

Google just told everyone that if you get a free blog on a platform that has "a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality" your blog /free site will/could be gone too.

I don't see anything wrong with that.

[almighty monkey]

It's not like 'stay out of bad neighborhoods if you want to rank' is new advice, is it?

And lets be honest, .co.cc was pretty much as bad as they get.

[Seb7]

One domain, 50,000 malware, ban 'em I say. Using one domain like it's a tld is already a scam anyhow. If they really wanted to stay indexed, then they should have taken better control over it's content.

[adder]

Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Sold my last .co.cc 2 months ago LOL!

Can we please now see .TK and .INFO banned? Does anyone know a .tk or .info site that provides decent quality and value?

[walkman]

Can we please now see .TK and .INFO banned? Does anyone know a .tk or .info site that provides decent quality and value?

My point exactly! Slippery slope

[HuskyPup]

Does anyone know a .tk or .info site that provides decent quality and value?

Yep, I deal with several well-established companies under .tk, it is a prospering country you know? As for .info I have all my sites link to our example.info where we hold all our privacy/cookies/legalese and Germany for one would be very pi$$ed off, .info is very big there for company and informational sites and one of Germany's biggest hotel booking sites uses .info.

[lucy24]

Yep, I deal with several well-established companies under .tk, it is a prospering country you know?

It's a country?! I thought it was a flyspeck on my globe :(

Does their prosperity come from anything other than the offshore business that's been chased away from the Caribbean?

[HuskyPup]

It's a country?!

Doh...hahaha...apologies, I was thinking of Turkmenistan .tm, lots of gas and oil there!