Can Private Whois Data Lead to a Penalty in Google?
Matt Cutts recently dropped a very interesting nugget of information regarding the consequences of concealing whois data (aka privacy protection). This was during the site review session at Pubcon Vegas 2006.
The site being reviewed was having trouble ranking in Google. After noting a few other suspicious aspects of the site (most notably that the owner had about 40 similar sites) , Matt touched on whois:
when I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively unusual. 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.
Matt Cutts summarized the review-session and more here.
So it seems definite that hiding whois data can hurt search rankings (in some situations). That’s quite a valuable nugget of info.
I think this hidden whois-data penalty may have contributed to penalties 4 of my sites recently received last fall in Google. It sucks, but I’ve resolved myself to make higher quality sites, and focus on the long term.
Google is just getting too damn good at sniffing out bullshiet. Not to mention the fact that MSN, and Yahoo to some extent, have been making big strides lately in the quality of their search products.
January 19th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I think this may be the reason several of my sites have had a harder time rating in Google.
My site http://www.bridalblog.info only get a PR 3 even though I have literally thousands of backlinks into the site by virtue of writing and submitting 50 articles and having them distributed.
This really stinks but I will start exposing my personal information under the whois-data to prevent this from occurring in the future. Thanks for the heads up.