What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon
Posted Tuesday, January 10th, 2006. Filed under Google, Internet Marketing Tips, SEO People, SEO Questions, SEO Research, SEO Tools.
Last month I asked Nick Wilsdon to write an article about what Google knows about your domain names, and here's his guest post. Nick has worked as a domain registrar for Tucows since 2000 and founded e3internet.com.
Google became a domain registrar in February 2005, likely not to buy or sell domains but to gain greater access to domain information and API access for high-volume automated WHOIS queries, unlike the limited public WHOIS service. Nick believes Google built or is building a tool to analyze domain names and track their historical WHOIS picture over time.
Such a tool would let Google track domain age, connect networks and portfolios, and see when a domain changed ownership to adjust its trust value. Domain privacy services hide some information, but current registrar, creation date, expiry date, and name servers are still visible, so a system could flag changes in this data as a sign of ownership change, especially around domain expiry and drop dates.
This is speculation, but it's Google's modus operandi to accumulate data and incorporate it into their algorithm. Careful management of domain information may be another string SEOs need to add to their bow.
January 11th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Good article. These same thoughts have been tickling the back of my brain since last February. Thanks for putting it all together.
January 11th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Thanks Dan (and Jim)
Yes I don’t think I’m putting anything revolutionary out here but hopefully bringing it together allows people to see what Google may be doing with this data.
I got sent a couple of emails about how to apply this, the space/time on this didn’t really allow for that. My advice would be to similar to the current thinking on buying old domains - change as little as possible/do it slowly. Consider keeping the same host (name servers) and registrar. If you want to use domain privacy then get the seller to set that up some months before the domain handover, then continue with the same provider.
It maybe that Google views domain privacy as a reason to reduce trust in the domain. I don’t have any research on this. There is a lot of contention on this topic among the registries. For example the Belgium (.be) has never allowed it and the US (.us) registry is banning this service shortly, while the UK (.uk) are strong advocates of this service. There is not a registry wide consensus on whether this is a_good_thing yet.
Certainly the entrance into the market of companies who register the domain on your behalf (to hide your details) is a worrying development. Technically they own the domain and if they don’t play nicely it turns into a very messy situation.
January 11th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
heres a short article i wrote about “private domains”:Do Privae Domain Registrations Hurn Rankings” possibly making ranking more difficult.
I outline a scenario where a search engine could reduce the value of a link if both pages were on private domains with the same registrar. I am sure Google probably is more sophisticated than this though.
January 11th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
[...] Read the rest of Nick’s blog post. Tags: google, domain registrar [...]
January 11th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
[...] Peter just pointed me to an article adding to the speculation about Google becoming a registrar: Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog » Blog Archive » What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon [...]
January 11th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
I’m not so sure about the Domain Privacy idea. The issue with this is that although they do have access to the root zone info on all domains for “thin” registries such as .com / .net which are the biggest two GTLD’s, this data only includes the domain, create, expire and name servers as listed in the article above. It would be tough to determine whether a domain is using a privacy service based on this alone without corroborating through whois.
In order to truly determine if privacy is used they would have to query the whois server of the registrar of record for that domain directly to find out the details and most registrars including us over here at Tucows severely limit general public access. Although by ICANN mandate we do raise these limits for other registrars, that ceiling is set based on how many domains are being transferred between registrar tags and Google is not registering domains for the public so their volume wouldn’t necessarily warrant such an increase.
Past the security of having all of your own domains on your own Registrar tag, I believe most of the value of this move would have been to access the “drop lists” or domain expiry lists that the registry publishes to every registrar for all domains by every registrar on a daily basis. This way they would know domains that are changing ownership and thereby tweak their search results accordingly.
The only wrench is that most of the top ten registrars have either significantly reduced or almost completely eliminated the deletion of their domain names by auctioning them off, or in extreme cases even keeping them for themselves if they generate revenue through traffic so that benefit may have been short lived.
January 12th, 2006 at 12:18 am
Do you think that google peeks at the actual owner (not just the changes) and uses it to connect domains that are hosted at different IP addresses?
January 12th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
It makes absolute perfect sense. It gives G 20/20 vision on the backend. This is going to be huge, very important to keep in mind. Great article Jim.
January 12th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Hi Peter
It’s great to have you involved in this issue, I certainly respect the extensive knowledge you and Frank have in this area. I’d really like to know if Tucows has seen a significant number of queries coming from Google?
It’s a fair point that few registries would be willing to increase their limits for Google but at least by becoming a registrar they have met the basic conditions to begin negotiations on this issue.
As you explain, the drop lists are of very limited value with the top registrars (Tucows soon too) auctioning off domains before expiry. Certainly if Google intends to stop the benefits of buying old domain names this would not be so helpful. If they are going to use domain data in a meanful way they need to develop a tool of this nature.
Ptiddy - that is an interesting take on this. I think though you would have to consider that within the current discussion on the way Google treats networks. These days with the rise of so many blogging and advertising networks, Google has become more accepting of this practice. My view is that is you’re linking for the visitors and not the search engines then you’re going to be fine.
SEO Intermediate - my view is that Google would want to use the WHOIS data to pick out patterns of ownership. Of course their unique perspective on the internet allows then to likely pick out networks through their linking patterns. Simply putting your sites on individual IP’s is not going to hide the connection. You should read some of the comments that Ammon John has made on this.
January 12th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Don’t be surprised if Google also pays attention to the length of your domain registration which may include adding a few more credibility points to those domains that the owners have registered for multiple years.
January 14th, 2006 at 8:25 am
[...] http://www.jimboykin.com/what-does-google-know-about-your-domain-names-by-nick-wilsdon/ Permalink [...]
January 14th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
don’t you think they can license cached copies of the whois data that companies like the one that runs whois.sc use?
January 21st, 2006 at 9:38 am
[...] To je bilo vse OK. Par dni nazaj pa sem naletel na zelo zanimiv članek o googlu in temu, kako je postal registrar domen februarja 2005. Špekulacije obstajajo, da ker domen ne trži je to samo zaradi dostopa do dodatnih informacij. In tako ima še več podatkov za obdelavo, kot jih ima že tako ali tako, in vprašanje je ali privatno registirirana domena zadostuje za googla. Verjetno ne. Google knows. [...]
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:58 pm
[...] Nick Wilsdon has written an interesting article on what Google could be doing as a domain registrar, you can read it here [...]
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:50 am
Hi tpiddy,
True, the API service that whois.sc offers seems very useful. I was even considering it myself for one of my tools recently. However it too has limits, their top account has limitations, 143′000 queries per month.
The normal method of arranging these volume limitations with the Registries is through becoming a client. The Registry/Registrar relationship is designed for this.
January 26th, 2006 at 12:52 am
Nick,
Thanks for this article and the feedback to our comments. Indeed, it would very interesting to know where the traffic for the Tucows download website originates.
However since this is handled in a different division of the company, we don’t have access to those numbers
I think after all of these years Tucows has developed into a big brand on the Internet, that can certainly by itself generate type-in and search engine traffic.
/Frank
PS: As always, I am stating my own opinion.
January 31st, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Domain Names, Google and SEO
…
February 14th, 2006 at 4:41 am
Hello,
Indeed, i find this article with a certain grain of truth. I own a website that is ranked 6/10 in google and i’ve started to pay attention to my rankings after purchasing a second domain ( check rankings at http://www.mypagerank.net/ ). I’ve discovered that after I installed the second domain, the backlinks and the indexed pages doubled their importance on google. At this point, I intend on purchasing several domain names for mai project in order to become a big player ( you can also check http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm to see what I mean ).
I’ve also read the Google patent but I don’t recall them mentioning about this fact in there.
February 18th, 2006 at 11:01 am
[...] Nick Wilsdon has written a good article of interest to anyone involved in SEO, What does Google know about your domain names? [...]
May 21st, 2006 at 8:05 pm
[...] So I fixed that mistake, and changed everyone levels to regular ole users (but if you want to submit an article to me, feel free….the best article I’ve had on my blog was written by guest writer Nick Wilsdon). [...]
June 13th, 2006 at 8:05 am
[...] What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon - Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog (tags: domain.names google seo jim.boykin nick.wilsdon) [...]
June 18th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
[...] What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon Jan 10, 2006 [...]
June 12th, 2007 at 5:24 am
i prefer to register anonymously domens, + 4 bucks
August 14th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Just out of interest, is there a legitimate, white hat way to register domain names anonymously. My name is closely associated with my business, and I’d like to set up a site focussing on subjects unrelated to my business areas, without any perceptible connection between my computing/business persona and my academic humanities persona. Usually the two fit together quite well but not in this instance - I’d really like to be able to buy a domain name without the two becoming entangled with each other on Whois. All I want really is a pen name, so that I can get on with other non-commerical activities.
October 12th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
That’s really interesting. I’d be curious to know more about what google can find out by being a registrar. Also, I never knew a you could become a registrar without selling domains.