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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would using private registration solve that problem?
This could work well if the system flagged webmasters, then required a manual review… but the fact that it’s automated (at least that what it sounds like) is a little disturbing. There are way too many unknown variables there.
You would think it would; however, I’ve had some werid experiences with targeted ads that make me think Google can see the private domains I have regged. (I regged some questionable domains once upon a time — private registration from the get-go) and I swear Google knows and sends me different ads than other people see on the same page.
I went to one of my own business resources pages and there were all these “alternative lifestyle” ads, and I got bent out of shape because I thought my visitors were seeing these ads too and might get offended. I mean, afterall, there was NOTHING on that page that would have triggered those keywords… so I asked people on Webmaster Radio Chat to go look at the page and NO ONE else saw the ads I did. After we discussed it for awhile, it really seemed like the only possible explanation was behavioral targeting.
So, in a nutshell, if it’s REALLY important to keep the site unattached to you and your money site, I’d register it to some completely different org or person. I guess that sounds sort of shady, but I don’t want to risk a “bad” association and hurt my primary site.
One thing that Matt said was that if you don’t want a site to negatively impact your primary site, then use Robots.txt so that it doesn’t appear in the SERPs. However, this is still a bogus answer if you ask me. Why can’t I have some fun sites to play with on my own time without worrying about it harming my primary site(s)? If a site is quality, it should rank. If a site isn’t quality then it won’t rank. Non-related sites shouldn’t have any effect on the SERPs of quality sites.
In the case Google were really even thinking about using this kind of information against webmasters, it is a completely insane idea. A webmaster having 5000 domains has nothing to do with any of his specific sites. One could perfectly have a network of hundreds of spammy, MFA sites, and that shouldn’t have anything to do with another site, owned by the same person, built with perfectly white hat methods. Those sites should be independent, and only related by links and reasonable criteria like that. One could argue that Google could “rightfully” ban the spammy, MFA sites, but I believe that linking that to other independent sites just for being owned by the same person, is one of the most stupid things Google could ever do.
Mixing up things like this would probably even violate a few rights, and in such case (if proven) should be taken to court.
Great Google, “do no evil” just until you don’t like someone (or his domains)…
After the session I heard Matt elaborate: when Google does testing with Joe surfer they say parked domains is one of their top annoyances. So if you have a parked domain either robots.txt it out or use a 301 redirect to an active site. I do not recall any direct mention of devaluing sites based on ownership so maybe it was a just a scare tactic to rouse the masses into compliance.
When they paid to become a registrar, they were very up-front about the fact they had no intention of actually registering domains. They were doing it to get at the underlying data.
While I obviously can’t comment on how they actually use it, it would make sense to me if they used it as a tie-breaker in a case where someone owned three sites with virtually the same content. Not sure if the content was really the same? Look at the registration info for the three domains. Same registrant? Probably the same content then. Two sites get dropped and the third gets to stay. (Not that I’ve ever seen that happen and suggested that the company fix it by moving the registrations for the three domains to separate accounts and then seen all three domains come back into the SERPs or anything.)
Honestly.. who cares anyway. 🙂
Google will continue trying to unify data for profiling purposes and people will continue to sidestep it.
What a wonderfully connected world we live in 🙂
Look at the traffic detail for “fapomatic.com” on alexa. You can see all the websites owned it’s owner on the left under “See other sites owned”. That’s what happen when you don’t use private registration