Is domain registration privacy an issue for trust or local ranking?

[whitesell]

Personally, I've never thought it was a good idea for any business to use privacy services when registering a domain. I've been suspicious of companies with hidden domain ownership data.

Is this a factor in overall domain or website trust? I've not seen anything listing domain registration records as a valuable citation but it seems to me that it could be considered very authoritative.

Has anyone tested this?

thanks,
Jim

 

[armstead]

Is this a factor in overall domain or website trust? I've not seen anything listing domain registration records as a valuable citation but it seems to me that it could be considered very authoritative.

When you mention website trust are you talking about a visitor or a search engine spider?

 

[whitesell]

I'm thinking in terms of trust given by Google - trust built by consistent NAP, hi trust citations, etc.

I'm wondering if you lower the trust Google has in a website if the domain owner's NAP is hidden by domain registration privacy?

 

[Andrew Scherer]

I'm wondering if you lower the trust Google has in a website if the domain owner's NAP is hidden by domain registration privacy?

Maybe, but domains regged by proxy are really common. It's tough to say for sure.

 

[travolto]

from my experience you don't receive any penalization on privately registered domains.
99% of your ranking is good back links and the right keywords and text on the page. Its still pretty much like it used to be in the beginning just that blogs received more weighting than they used to.

 

[armstead]

I'm wondering if you lower the trust Google has in a website if the domain owner's NAP is hidden by domain registration privacy?

Like others have said it's kind of hard to tell. From all of the stuff I have read where people have broken down the 200 things that they think Google looks into to rank your site, I don't remember seeing anything about registration privacy on domains be one of them.

If it would be a little tough to test it as well. I wouldn't be to worried about it as there could be a multitude of reasons why someone might keep the domain registration private.

 

[Broland]

Yes I believe it is, and if you put your business NAP in the whois info that helps more I'll tell you that it is in some of Google's patents for search algorithms - not that private whois will hurt you but more so that public can help a bit.

 

[armstead]

Yes I believe it is, and if you put your business NAP in the whois info that helps more I'll tell you that it is in some of Google's patents for search algorithms - not that private whois will hurt you but more so that public can help a bit.

Do you have a link to some of the patents? I have never heard or read anything about the domain privacy helping or hurting in anyway.

 

[Nathan Thomas]

Like others have said it's kind of hard to tell. From all of the stuff I have read where people have broken down the 200 things that they think Google looks into to rank your site, I don't remember seeing anything about registration privacy on domains be one of them.

If it would be a little tough to test it as well. I wouldn't be to worried about it as there could be a multitude of reasons why someone might keep the domain registration private.

Well to be fair those 200 "ranking signals" are just speculation.

Personally, I've never had a problem ranking sites with domain privacy. I have a lot of data at my fingertips from my own clients but I never checked correlation of rankings with whether or not privacy was enabled. Should make for an interesting analysis.

 

[leadjoint]

I have had the privacy options on for as long as I remember since my domain registrar offered them for free. A few months back, they made it paid and I did not pay up. I have not seen any change in ranking for any of my websites.

So if your question is from a search signal point of view, then I think the answer is no.

 

[Andrew Sawyer]

Google is a registrar therefore your private registration info isn't private from them.

 

[Broland]

Do you have a link to some of the patents? I have never heard or read anything about the domain privacy helping or hurting in anyway.

Sorry I haven't been on here much lately. I've seen it in a few but only remember this one off the top of my head right now: https://www.google.com/patents/US8407231

Whole thing is a good read, but here are some related highlights:

?..the history data may include data relating to: document inception dates; document content updates/changes; query analysis; link-based criteria; anchor text (e.g., the text in which a hyperlink is embedded, typically underlined or otherwise highlighted in a document); traffic; user behavior; domain-related information; ranking history; user maintained/generated data (e.g., bookmarks); unique words, bigrams, and phrases in anchor text; linkage of independent peers; and/or document topics. These different types of history data are described in additional detail below. In other implementations, the history data may include additional or different kinds of data.


Individuals who attempt to deceive (spam) search engines often use throwaway or ?doorway? domains and attempt to obtain as much traffic as possible before being caught. Information regarding the legitimacy of the domains may be used by search engine 125 when scoring the documents associated with these domains.
Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
Also, or alternatively, the domain name server (DNS) record for a domain may be monitored to predict whether a domain is legitimate. The DNS record contains details of who registered the domain, administrative and technical addresses, and the addresses of name servers (i.e., servers that resolve the domain name into an IP address). By analyzing this data over time for a domain, illegitimate domains may be identified. For instance, search engine 125 may monitor whether physically correct address information exists over a period of time, whether contact information for the domain changes relatively often, whether there is a relatively high number of changes between different name servers and hosting companies, etc. In one implementation, a list of known-bad contact information, name servers, and/or IP addresses may be identified, stored, and used in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

 

[armstead]

Sorry I haven't been on here much lately. I've seen it in a few but only remember this one off the top of my head right now: https://www.google.com/patents/US8407231

Wow. Thank you for posting that.