What Are They Hiding?

4/6/2009 Should hiding the ownership of a domain name count as a negative against a website by Google? Websites hiding their ownership have a higher probability of being spam, fake or trying to mislead visitors. I know whenever I look up the ownership of a domain name and I see that it’s hidden, it lowers my trust of the website slightly. It takes some effort to look up every website, but isn’t that the type of effort and homework that search engines are trying to do in order to recognize who to trust programmatically?