This one is short and sweet. A new domain recently wasn’t getting any SEO traffic after 2 months. As soon as the registration was made non-private i.e. we removed the domainsByProxy mask on who owns the domain, it started getting traffic and has been growing ever since.
Correlation does not equal causation, but it does give me pause.
While ICANN has made it clear that the whois database has one purpose only, Google publicly stated they became a registrar to “increase the quality of our search results“.
Mark,
That is exactly the idea. I will two duplicate WordPress templates on extremely similar domains. Once I finish I will report back
Tim: Awesome idea. Blog about your results when you’re done – I’d love to see the effect. To make the test valid you could use a random content generator with the same vocabulary, and backlinks from identical sources with the same link text and link page position on each source. I’d also focus on making sure stuff in H1/H2/bold tags etc is very similar if not identical. You can probably make all headings identical without incurring a dup content penalty.
There is a pretty easy way to test this. Setup two identical websites, one with privacy and one without. I guess I will do this and report back.
I think this only works for tld’s such as .com, .org, .info etc, not for cctld’s.
But nice to know this information.
Thanks for sharing your data Jeff. Yes the domain was using domainsByProxy via GoDaddy private reg.
I have a new website, less than two months old, with a private registration. It’s doing great in Google rankings and getting more and more search traffic everyday. However, it’s not competing for super highly competitive terms. But the private registration is not hampering it at all.
I would look somewhere else. Or maybe DomainsByProxy is the problem.
Is the same true for adcenter?
Hi John. In general I don’t post any data that identifies site specifics. It’s similar to the policy you’ll find on webmasterworld.com or other great SEO/SEM/Viral/Affiliate/Ad/Marketing forums.
What would be helpful is if you post your referrer stats for these time periods so we can see if the traffic is coming from Google search or elsewhere.