Privacy: Is Whois info used to help establish an admin relationship between sites in addition to host/IP etc ?
-
Hi
Do you think Google looks at WhoIs details as a contributing factor to establishing an adminsitrative relationship between two domains (in addition to being hosted on similar hosts/IP blocks etc), and in regard to linkbuilding would having teh same whois details on both sites have a negative effect or be perfectly ok (if the sites are on different hosts/ip blocks) ?
Also do you think whois privacy turned on has a negative effect on trust and subsequent seo ?
Considering the answer to the above two questions: Do you think its a good or bad idea to have domain reg/whois ‘privacy’ turned on for a site of curated content relating to the project/primary sites niche, and linking to this site for contextual link benefit ?
Im building out a site of curated content that i want to perform well in-itself as well as providing backlink benefit to the primary site but worried if they both have same whois details will cause seo problems or would that only be if also had same host/ip footprint ?
Should i enable whois privacy, use a different address for reg, or actually make a point of using the same whois details for transparency ?
All Best
Dan -
cool cheers
-
I would personally, but not for any SEO benefits or trying to hide anything to Google. Just because I can and stops people snooping.
-Andy
-
Hi there
I really don't think it matters overall in the grand scheme so long as you are providing a valuable experience with your content and take proper steps to eliminate duplicate content issues.
To reference Andy below, there are sites that get tons of organic rankings / traffic with private Whois sites, and the same for public Whois. In the grand scheme of thinks, if you are linking naturally and not abusing anchor text and giving credit where it is due, you should be fine.
Hope this helps!
-
So IYO prob is best if i turn privacy on rather than 'potentially' show an administrative relationship by having same details ?
-
great thanks Andy !
-
Thanks Patrick !
So having whois data same for two interlinking sites could negate or heavily reduce any link benefit since they do likely use it to determine administrative relationship ? so should turn privacy on except that can also reduce trust in the domain!
So any ideas which is the least worse option if that is the case ? reducing the trust via privacy on option or admitting an admin relationship between the sites via whois option ?
All Best
Dan
-
So your saying that if i use 'who is privacy on' for the new site, it shouldn't have a negative effect for that sites seo
Absolutely. I have a wide range of clients, some of who like to hide their personal details and others who don't. None have any negative effects for either. Google is more interested in how good a site is, rather than who the admin contact is.
Can I just add, if there is actual test data that I haven't seen, I would be very interested to have a look.
-Andy
-
Definitely true! I was just stating it for the reference of Matt talking about Whois data back then to reference information.
-
Just be a little cautions with info dating back to 2006-2007. You can't rely on that now.
-
Thanks for the quick response Andy !
So your saying that if i use 'who is privacy on' for the new site, it shouldn't have a negative effect for that sites seo BUT Google doesn't look at 'WhoIs' info to establish an administrative relationship between two sites anyway, hence there's no need to use it since same whois details shouldn't cause any issues?
-
Hi there
Cyrus gave a great answer to this a few years back. You can read that here.
That being said, some people think Whois data is used as a ranking factor (6, 8, 9, 63) or at least used in some ranking factors.
Matt Cutts has stated as well:
"…When I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively unusual. …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."
In my opinion, it's better to be open than hide information. But that's upto you to do the research and see what best suits you.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
I would say this is a resounding no to both questions here Dan. I have never seen anything that would suggest this and can imagine it would be full of problems for Google to try and do.
Use WHOIS privacy if you don't want anyone to see who the site belongs to, but that is as far as your concerns need go
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site hacked in Jan. Redeveloped new site. Still not ranking. Should we change domain?
Our top ranking site in the UK was hacked at the end of 2014. http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/ The site was the subject of a manual spam action from Google. After several unsuccessful attempts to clean it up, using Securi.net and reinstating old versions of the site, changing passwords etc. we took the decision to redevelop the site. We also changed hosting provider as we had received absolutely no support from them whatsoever in resolving the issue. So far we have: Removed the old website files off the server Developed a new website having implemented 301's for all the old URL's (except the spam ones) Submitted a reconsideration request for the manual spam action, which was accepted. Disavowed all the spammy inbound links through Webmaster Tools Implemented custom URL parameters through Google to not index the SPAM URLs ( which were using parameters) Our organic traffic is down by 63% compared to last year, and we are not ranking for most of our target keywords any longer. Is there anything that I am missing in the actions I have taken so far? We were advised that at this stage changing domain and starting again might be the way to go. However the current domain has been used by us since 2007, so it would be a big call. Any advice is appreciated, thanks. Sue - http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | galwaygirl0 -
Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
Technical SEO | | Nanook10 -
Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!
Hi all, I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com. For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking. Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure? I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT. For example, /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm) However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them? The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings? The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have these online anymore. How should I remove these? I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Site-Wide Header image w/ Link hurting me?
I have a banner in the header that is constant across all pages except the one it links to. It goes in before the content div and this search term is #1 across google in almost every variation, but it appears to link in a lot of the non relevant pages for #2 spots in some cases. While this is a relatively new domain (started 03/12), but this has been a constant rank for about 2 months. I'm wondering if this may be hurting the keyword targeting of my internal pages and if i should no follow that header image on all pages except the homepage?
Technical SEO | | choiceenergy0 -
Mobile site rank on Google S.E. instead of desktop site.
Hello, all SEOers~ Today, I would like to hear your opinion regarding on Mobile site and duplicate contents issue. I have a mobile version of our website that is hosted on a subdomain (m instead www). Site is targeting UK and Its essentially the same content, formatted differently. So every URL on www exists also at the "m" subdomain and is identical content. (there are some different contents, yet I could say about 90% or more contents are same) Recently I've noticed that search results are showing links to our mobile site instead of the desktop site. (Google UK) I have a sitemap.xml for both sites, the mobile sitemap defined as follows: I didn't block googlebot from mobile site and also didn't block googlebot-mobile from desktop site. I read and watched Google webmaster tool forum and related video from Matt Cutts. I found many opinion that there is possibility which cause duplicate contents issue and I should do one of followings. 1. Block googlebot from mobile site. 2. Use canonical Tag on mobile site which points to desktop site. 3. Create and develop different contents (needless to say...) Do you think duplicate contents issue caused my mobile site rank on S.E. instead of my desktop site? also Do you think those method will help to show my desktop site on S.E.? I was wondering that I have multi-country sites which is same site format as I mentioned above. However, my other country sites are totally doing fine on Google. Only difference that I found is my other country sites have different Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop site, but my UK mobile site has same Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop. Do you think this also has something to do with current problem? Please people~! Feel free to make some comments and share your opinion. Thanks for reading my long long explanation.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping
Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Problem with my site
the site is casino.pt we created the site 7-8 month ago, we started to push it by good and natural links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.casino.pt/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page), links in sites with content rich and most of them related to gambling and sport topics. During the first 3-5 months, the rankings were better and better, after the 6 months, the site lose all its rankings. Aditional details http://www.casino.pt/robots.txt http://www.google.pt/#hl=pt-PT&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=805&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casino.pt&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=2651649a33cd228 no critical errors in google webmaster tools any idea how can I fix it? thanks
Technical SEO | | Yaron530 -
Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
Our site is secured throughout, so it loads sitewide as https. It is canonicalized properly - any attempt to load an existing page as http will force to https. My concern is with backlinks. We've put a lot of effort into social media, so we're getting some nice blog linkage. The problem is that the links are generally to http rather than https (understandable, since that's the default for most web users). The site still loads with no problem, but my concern is that since a redirect doesn't transfer all the link juice across, we're leaking some perfectly good link credit. From the standpoint of backlinkage, are we harming ourselves by making the whole site secure by default? The site presently isn't very big, but I'm looking at adding hundreds of new pages to the site, so if we're going to make the change, now is the time to do so. Let me know what you think!
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0