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Google cannot see past private registrations

Posted on 29. Nov, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

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This whole “can Google see past/around private domain registrations” thing that came out of the Interactive SERP Site Review session at PubCon Vegas has been bothering me a little, not because I’m worried (because I’m not, okay? I’m not). But in the interest of furthering the academic discourse, I decided to do a little research.

I im’d a friend of mine who used to work for Moniker and asked if he had access to, or if anyone from the registrar side had access to, the WHOIS info on private domain registrations. His reply was that “only registrars have access to the private domain registration information, but only for those domains they hold/manage”.

So, Google, although a registrar, does not have access to anyone’s private WHOIS info because Google doesn’t manage or handle registrations for the general public.

To confirm this, I also read ICANN’s “Preliminary Task Force Report on Whois Services” issued on 22 November 2006. If you look under Summary of task force discussion (including proposals for access to data) you’ll see the following:

There are two different classes of requests for registration information.

1) Requests for information about registrations that are managed through a private registration or registration proxy service (a “type 1″ request)

2) Requests for information for regular, non-proxy/non-private registrations. (a “type 2″ request)

These requests are typically dealt with differently by registrars.

Requests are typically taken in by a single point of contact at a registrar which liaises with or escalates to the registrars legal department or staff.

There’s other information in the report, but that’s the part that I think is the most clear. It confirms what my contact said, which is that registrars have access to the registration data for private registrations, but only for the domains they manage.

So, Google cannot see past private registration protection. That being said, it doesn’t mean webmasters are not being profiled. It just means they aren’t using special, non-public information to build the profiles. (See comments to my previous post)

Just an update… I know I’ll sleep better tonight. ;)

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Update to the “Anything You Reg” Post

Posted on 22. Nov, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

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I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Shoemoney’s “Net Income” show on Webmaster Radio on Tuesday, November 21 (listen here if you are so inclined), and we discussed the session at PubCon where Matt Cutts did a quick clickety-click and suddenly knew about all 40+ of the reviewees registered domains, and gave him a little bit of a hard time about it.

What I had taken away from that was that Google is profiling webmasters, and when we hit a certain threshhold in terms of quantity and quality of domains registered, it flags us. Flags us as what? Okay, I don’t know that, and I’m fairly positive no one from Google is going to volunteer that information. However, I did speculate on the possible ramifications in my post the other day.

So on to the update…

Brian B., who was sitting with me at the session, commented on Matt Cutts’ recap and pointed out what I had suspected, which is that Google can see past privacy protection.

…you mentioned that you knew that this person owned 40+ sites, and afterwards when you clicked on the WhoIs info that they were all privacy protected. I think you just let it slip that Google has access to all the WhoIs info regardless of what is protected from public domain. That’s a pretty big statement to make and will probably make a lot of people nervous.

Um, yeah! Makes me nervous and I’m not even doing anything wrong. (I swear!) Matt replied to Brian and explained that he did not employ any voodoo or secret Google magic to determine that the domains the reviewee owned were all privacy protected… [...]

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Anything you register can and will be held against you…

Posted on 20. Nov, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby.

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During the big Interactive Site Review clinic at PubCon last week, Matt Cutts was was using some type of tool that allowed him to pull up a list of every single domain a person/company has registered, whether it is in use or not. (It’s apparently quite top-secret, as he was sitting down at the end of the table with his laptop angled so the other panelists couldn’t see his screen… subtle, no?)

Additionally, he made comments to the site reviewees about the types and quantities of domains regged and how well (or not) the extra domains relate to the site/topic in question, implying that the dozen or so unrelated domains were unnecessary at best and, at worst, possibly harmful to their SERPs.

Apparently, Google has some sort of magic ability to look at all of your domains at once, and uses this information to decide if you’re a dirty spammer or someone who is authoritative about their topic and therefore worthy of better rank. I can’t really decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

On the one hand, I can see where you might be inclined to devalue a site run by someone who owns a ton of keyword laden, hyphen riddled domains because that sort of indicates that he/she might, maybe, be an MFA’er or worse. But then again, there really isn’t any proof based solely on one’s domain holdings.

What if the person in question just went on a drunken registration spree one night (not that I’ve done that before, I swear), or maybe regged a bunch of domains with the plan to park them and offer them up for sale? Should their “real” sites be punished for that? I would seriously hope not.

So now, I’m sifting through my domain portfolio to make sure I’m not sitting on anything that might be held against my “money” site and hurt its rankings. If I do find questionable domains, I think I’ll be transferring the registration to my sister or possibly one of my cats, so they can’t be traced back to me anymore :-)

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