7 ms·
Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results
- jeggers5 15y agoI love how Google have the balls to do things like this, this can only be considered a good thing.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jawns 15y agoDang ... there goes traffic to the First State Tourism Board's http://www.visit-delaware.co.cc http://www.visit-delaware.co.cc
- AlecSchueler 15y agoWouldn't it make sense for them to be using .us anyway?
- city41 15y agoThe page says Delaware's new slogan is "Delaware: boring on purpose" which seems to suggest it is a parody site.
- yaakov34 15y agoThe Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've learned to imitate user participation, reviews, blogs, anything that you care to name that you used to look for to ferret out the really good pages. I'll be more specific: about a century ago, in internet years that is, it was a good idea to add "review" to the search terms to see what actual users were saying about a product. This has become an extremely bad idea now, since SEO specialists (I am using neutral language here) noticed this, and have registered 1.5 quintillion domains along the line of best-barbecue-reviews.com and reliable-handbag-reviews.com and what have you; and these domains are the last places to contain actual reliable reviews of anything, being paid advertising in disguise, instead. And Google loves to find search terms in domain names. And that's just a tiny, tiny part of it. P.S. Please don't turn this into a thread of recommendations for VPN providers - it will probably get flagged as off-topic.
- nodata 15y agoGoogle's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it. It used to be that I could search for something, say this: word1 word2 and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words. Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this: +word1 +word2 And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more. It's crap. Maybe duckduckgo does it right. I'll give it a go.
- speckledjim 15y agoNever had any issue. Give some examples of what doesn't seem to work for you.
- brudgers 15y agoYour results are likely to be different because of Google's practice of "personalizing" results based upon the consumer's profile. Any discussion of the quality of Google's results should be preceded with "For me."
- speckledjim 15y agoThat's a cop out. Provide examples, on a clean browser/incognito/no cookies/etc
- mostly_harmless 15y agomaybe I'm just used google's crap, but after using DDG for a week, I found that it gave results that i didnt want more often. Then again, maybe it is just the interface, Google has a cleaner interface IMO making it easier to see results. And its also likely that i didnt get used to some of the special additions in DDG like tags and what ever else.
- silverbax88 15y agoGoogle results have always been crap, they were just 'less crap' than other search engines until the past couple of years, where Google has been overwhelmed by spammers and, frankly, is losing that battle.
- Klinky 15y agoOne thing that irks me is Google News. It's hard to get your site listed on Google News but when you see some of the sites that are listed, you have to wonder why Google makes it so difficult. Some search terms bring up "news sites" that are essentially devoted to spamming health remedies and playing them off as though they were real news articles.
- yaakov34 15y agoI don't know, Google News actually doesn't seem very spammy to me. I just searched for "diabetes" - this is usually a good one to check if an index is spammed - and while it brings up some sensationalist garbage (that's life for you), it doesn't seem to find anything which wants my credit card number right now. Even a spam-king search like "weight loss", while it finds nothing interesting, doesn't seem like pure spam.
- chaud 15y agoTake a look at game search terms, like Warcraft. There are plenty of sites that sell in game currencies or items, along with sites that republish news from other sites mixed in the results.
- Klinky 15y agoDo a search for RezVera. I research digestive health news & this has been coming up a lot over the last few weeks. Either copycat sites or PR sites that link back to another site with an iframe containing a short form promo offering the supplement for $60 bucks. Blah.
- ryanmarkel 15y agoThis is a really good thing, even though the people using these domains will likely just move to another free provider; we've seen large chunks of spam on WordPress.com from these domains more than once (linkfarming). Kudos to Google.
- feint 15y agoi never really saw many co.cc domains in the search results anyway. From what i've heard, many of the co.cc domains were used for distributing malware. If you provide a free hosting service, you have to be prepared to constantly deal with spammers and phishers.
- ice5nake 15y agoSeems like a cop out to me. It kind of says, our technology can't weed these results out so we are just going to not deal with it. I am sure it is difficult problem; don't get me wrong. However, I'd rather see Google say that some fancy algorithm determined co.cc domains are junk and has relegated them appropriately.
- dave1010uk 15y agoDomains ending in .co.cc are subdomains, just like domains ending in .example.com or .uk.com. When people buy a subdomain then their purchase is not regulated in the same way as a domain (eg ending in .cc or .com) is.
- vaksel 15y agoyou could probably take it even further just by making it a lot more difficult to rank the other types of domains: 1. anything that's not a .com or .org(let's face it...if it's a .net, then it's most likely bought for seo optimization) 2. the .co.uk/.de etc, should only get a bonus in their own countries. 3. anything that's longer than 16 letters. If it is, chances are that its just a spam domain. 4. anything with a dash in the domain(the more dashes, the bigger the penalty). 5. anything with a # in the domain this way brands would be fine, but those crappy domains that were purchased solely for SEO wouldn't be as effective. Sure, .com exact match would be fine, but that's a lot less to worry about.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- CrazedGeek 15y agoMost ISPs I've used use .net for their domains, and there are plenty other legitimate sites that use .net (Battle.net, anyone?).
- vaksel 15y agobrands would still be able to rank. it's just going to get a lot more harder to rank legitimateISPs.net
- Zumzoa 15y ago>2. the .co.uk/.de etc, should only get a bonus in their own countries. A flawed rule. I deal with websites based in other countries and written in other languages. I also access websites from my home country when overseas.
- brudgers 15y ago5000 phishing sites cause Google to block 11,000,000 domains? That's less than 0.5%. First, is that really "a significant fraction?" Second, when did collective punishment become less evil than innocent until proven guilty?
- jasonlotito 15y agoThey blocked 1 domain and the millions of subdomains it was reselling.
- yaakov34 15y agoYou must somehow have avoided running into it, but .co.cc was a fever swamp and a nightmare. For any popular search terms you can think of, it contained "popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "my-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "best-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and so on ad freaking nauseam. And it got spammed all over your screen, because Google likes to find search terms in the domain name. What do you think was there? Do you think 11 million people woke up one day and decided ".co.cc would be a great domain for my business"? They should have nuked it from orbit a long time ago. EDIT: I just realized .co.cc is not actually down, but it's blocked by my provider now and no longer indexed by Google, so it's pretty much gone for me. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
- brudgers 15y agoIt's an ugly cheap kludge. Furthermore it is a kludge which raises a question about how good Google's new singing dancing search results filtering algorithm really is, if it can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/. <Google directed cynicism>The cynic in me sees the timing of this as the first salvo in an effort toward the monetization of the coming proliferation of new commoditized top-level domains. When search results are nothing more than an advertising platform, why should a search engine return your results unless you are paying for the screen space? Perhaps, /co.cc/ was not encouraging the use of Google Analytics or promoting Adwords sufficiently.</Google directed cynicism>
- yaakov34 15y ago
- parfe 15y agoGoogle blocked one domain that was reselling subdomains.
- bigwally 15y agoThis is one of the dumbest things Google has done. If Google really wants to get rid of 90 percent of spammy sites all they need to do is block any website that is registered with Godaddy.
- dangrossman 15y agoThat doesn't make much sense. GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world, with the most extensive general public advertising campaign, and manages over 45 million domains. They're the registrar for your neighbor and your neighborhood small business more often than not.
- sucuri2 15y agoAnd just as they blocked the .co.cc, the attackers are now using the .co.tv: http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/google-blocks-co-cc-attackers-are-now-using-co-tv.html http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/google-blocks-co-cc-attackers... Never ending battle...
- mikeklaas 15y agoAt Zite we have a domain-level spam filter and .co.cc is the the 6th strongest feature for spam indication. The first five are: cheap forex pills viagra urnitur