WHOIS Protection

[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...