SEO: Don't Use Private Registration | Hacker News Reader

SEO: Don't Use Private Registration

markmaunder.com

26 pointsmmaunder19 comments

Private registration is unlikely to be the reason why your site isn't ranking, modulo fairly specific past events prior to the private registration. (e.g. "I bought an expired domain for it's links, changed all the content, and then switched on private registration. Now it doesn't rank for anything.")

I sympathize with "I made a change, something happened, this whole field feels like voodoo, please tell me my change mattered." You're trying to black-box guess emergent behavior of a very complicated algorithm. In some circumstances that's the best alternative, but for this specific issue, the weight of past experiences personally or known to me is not in your favor.

I don't usually respond to trolls, but thought I'd respond to yours since the quotes you've used are misleading:

I didn't buy an expired domain.

It doesn't feel like voodoo. I've been breaking web apps since you were 12.

Aren't we all black-box guessing Google? Aren't you?

If I'm not mistaken, I don't think web apps existed when patio11 was 12.

I think Patrick's around my age (late 20s). Age 12 was right around the mid-1990s, which was right around when the first webapps (ViaWeb, Amazon.com, EBay, Altavista) were introduced.

I don't usually respond to trolls

Dude, did you just call Patio11 a troll? And then claim that you've been breaking web apps since he was 12?

Just when you think you've seen it all...

I apologize: I often use quotes to mark imagined dialogue. The first was supposed to be read as counter-factual: if a hypothetical person had done that, then yeah, it would make sense that having private domain registration could possibly tip them over into a penalty. I'm working on the assumption that you didn't do that, which means that I very much doubt it was the causational element in your case.

Patio you're obviously a good guy and my sincere apologies for taking your comments the wrong way. It was immediately after I had pre-breakfast coffee which usually puts me on edge and makes me type before I think. Sorry mate.

No problem. We all have times like that.

It's stuff like this that gives SEO such a bad rap.

No data to back up the claim. Not even a visual.

I ate a burrito for lunch today and traffic is through the roof! Must be the burrito!

Sigh.

Oh! Chicken, beef or steak? And from what store?! :)

Totally agree.

Agreed.

I'm currently working on a small project to replace Google Custom Search with a proper Apache Solr set up. Unfortunately the project manager heard at an SEO conference that Google punishes you for using competing in-site search products.

lol, I am going to use that line.

I have experimented extensively with various domain registrations parameters in correlation to SERPs. In my opinion, private registration does not have any effect. The only domain parameter that seems to have effect is the length of domain registration. Your domain is likely to have more trust value if the domain is registered for 5 or more years.

It's bullshit. I have dozens of websites ranking #1 for various keywords, and they are all whoisguard protected.

I've been doing SEO for 4 years (with some success) and this may be the first time I heard that private registration is bad for search results.

Exactly how much it matters I can't say.

But I can say that it does matter.

Why?

Because for one thing a whois record with valid info is cached in various places and creates unique info which is repackaged on other websites that get slurped.

Next, we run a whois server for our registrar and it does get hit by google bot every single day.

Along the same lines the registrar you use for your domain also matters.

None of this means that you can't rank well with private registration.

But unless you've got a specific reason to have privacy on your records there is no question that it is an advantage (for seo and other reasons) to have your info public (not to mention if it's private you stand a greater chance of losing your domain name..)

it's bullshit, there are plenty of private registration websites ranking #1 for plenty of competitive keywords

I find it amusing that Google, that started out (and still is) as a search engine, now has so much power as to influence the content in the web via the almost-necessary SEO gimmicks.

May be, just may be, it's time to go to user-generated user-moderated directory of web links. Yes? or No?

Google uses phrases like "hundreds of signals" to make people start to worry about meaningless crap like private registration or .com vs. .org vs. .net and so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com