WHOIS Protection

[u-Bob]

1. If you own a couple hundred domains, most registrars will give you the whoisprivacy for free... or at least at a huge discount. Talk to your account manager.

2. $3.80 is enormously expensive for whoisprivacy. Again, talk to your account manager.

3. Be careful with Namecheap... Personally, I use them... got about 150 domains there, but I would never keep anything mission critical there (for the same reasons I wouldn't keep anything important at Godaddy).
- Prices are decent, but not great.
- Whois privacy doesn't always work (especially if you register a lot of domains at the same time... sometimes their system misses one). In the past it took about about 24hrs before it kicked in. They've fixed that now...
- Email forwarding (on whoisguard) is very flaky.
- They have a history of suspending controversial but legal domains after a single complaint.

4. to those using PO boxes: It depends why you need the whoisprivacy. If you need it to hide your identity, a PO box will do nicely. If you need it for SEO reasons, then a PO Box is useless.

5. Registrars with free privacy: Fabulous, Webair, Gandi.
REgistrars with cheap privacy: Moniker, Name (Name.com whois privacy is very flaky).

[SheepGuy]

Originally Posted by u-Bob

4. to those using PO boxes: It depends why you need the whoisprivacy. If you need it to hide your identity, a PO box will do nicely. If you need it for SEO reasons, then a PO Box is useless.

Why would anyone possibly use a PO Box for SEO reasons?

[Toby]

Originally Posted by SheepGuy

Why would anyone possibly use a PO Box for SEO reasons?

Some believe that Google discredits back links from sites owned by the same entity (IP range, physical address, etc.)

IMO, it's just voodoo SEO



Another point re: WHOIS privacy. Changing existing domains to private will not fully hide the identity of the owner. Anyone with an account at a WHOIS service that provides registration history lookups will still see the old non-private information.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Toby

Some believe that Google discredits back links from sites owned by the same entity (IP range, physical address, etc.).
IMO, it's just voodoo SEO.

I understand that Google has one algorithm whose only
function is to laugh at attempts to hide things from Google.
I believe it has an icon that looks something like this...

[u-Bob]

Originally Posted by SheepGuy

Why would anyone possibly use a PO Box for SEO reasons?

SEO is all about patterns. Managing the information that is available about your sites.

We already know that Google uses tons of info (links, social media activity, keywords, keyword density, outgoing links,....). Some of the information Google is gathering or would be able to gather if they wanted to, may seem a bit far fetched. Some will just ignore it because they see no evidence that the information even matters.

Fact is: It's impossible for an SEO to know what exactly is making his sites rank. All we can do is make educated guesses. To do this we need to put ourselves in the place of the Google techs. We are the attackers, they are defending. They try to rank important sites higher than less important sites, so we try to make our sites look more important. We get more inbound links because important sites naturally get lots of inbound links. They try to detect and ignore bought links, link farms etc. We attack, they defend. To be able to defend they need to be able to detect what we are doing.

SEO is not about using that latest point and click tool but about staying ahead of the game. It's about not waiting until it's official that Google penalizes this or that. It's about hiding your tracks and taking into account the things that could be used to expose what you are doing.

Years ago, Google became a registrar. Why? for the whois info. They've already demonstrated that they take other domains owned by a webmaster into account.
Go through their patent applications... They talk about detecting whether or not sites are related base don whois info, historical whois info, affiliate ref codes(really) etc.

So, if you own lots of different domains and are interlinking them, it's a good idea to use whois privacy.

I've seen people on other forums, post that using a PO box would be a good alternative to this... Those people are obviously missing the whole point... hence my post...

[SheepGuy]

I don't spend much time worrying about SEO, sometimes I do well, sometimes I don't. I'm always a little bit amazed at the amount of time and effort some people go to chasing after this theory or that.

I have a PO Box just because I don't want my address publicly available.

[Buncha]

Originally Posted by u-Bob

1. If you own a couple hundred domains, most registrars will give you the whoisprivacy for free... or at least at a huge discount. Talk to your account manager.

This is good advice, and not just for WHOIS. They'll also give you discounts for renewals and transfers. Even if you own just 50-100 domains. Contact customer service and ask them what discounts they offer. I'd also mention if you see lower prices somewhere else. They might match the price to keep your business.

Namecheap offers a bulk discount for WHOIS. They sell 5 for $7.88 ($1.58 each).

http://www.namecheap.com/products/whoisguard.aspx