No Who.is Protection – The Consequences
One of our members on FightBack Networks just lost 15 sites because they didn’t have private whois, and every record had the same email address.
Whatever you do, please use fake whois (but make sure you can access the listed email address for whois verification), or use domain privacy, it costs $2 per year from godaddy or namecheap. Prices at other registrars may very.
Of course this is such an amateur move, leading you to ask why not just simply add a popup or warning when adding sites to any of the networks?
Yet it’s such a simple task that by right you should be doing as a rule of thumb anyway that creating a set rule like this just seems to be overthinking things in terms of site design. We would much prefer if the developers would continue with the wonderful work that they do in both protecting the network of networks already in place and planning and executing far more important updates such as the ones planned for the version 4.0 update.
Moving Registrar
If you’re like us though and are too lazy to create fake accounts and email addresses at whatever domain registrar you work with, simply move your private blog network domains to a registrar such as resell.biz as the registrar privacy is included for free. They would be more than happy to have your business – trust us!
SEO Host Nameservers
Know your SEO host nameservers? Well if you're not using custom nameservers then go to this URL:
http://who.is/nameserver/999.youSEOhost.com/ where "999.youSEOhost.com" is your nameserver name.
We’ve been looking at a well known SEO host, and oh yeah! The list of sites you get back are all blog network sites or autoblogs.
Easy targets for deindexing! Nicely grouped together for Google to find, and labelled "SEO Hosting".
I am also speaking from bad experiences we've had with SEO hosts... don't use them! This is something we will be monitoring closer in the future.
Just recently we had 4 sites deindexed in one day. Of course this is a rare occurrence but it’s something that could so easily have been avoided had the member in question simply taken the few minutes that was needed to protect their sites from the prying eyes of others. No doubt they’ll have learned a costly lesson from this, but just so as it doesn’t happen to you, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
nsIamA.Spammer.com
nsIspam.GoogleHard.com
And so this leads us to a simple yet relevant question on hosting - If you don't use an SEO host, presumably you're going for low-end hosting found in forums. I wonder whether some of these places carry just as much crap as SEO hosting companies. In other words, you're lumping your site with other PBNs anyway.
So is the only link the nameservers? Or the idea that the 'big hitter' SEO hosts will be infiltrated and deindexed? Or both? Because in terms of footprints of sites based on IP I would guess you'd find A LOT of the sites on low-end hosting to be purely for spam purposes - significantly more so than a random sample size from an average hosting company. Which could then also lead do issues anyway.
Thoughts?
Yeah of course every host has tons of spammy sites. But when your nameserver is ns1.suckyWebHost.com it's a lot better than ns1.Spam-SEO-host-where-Google-knows-almost-everyone-is-an-SEO.com.
It's like waving a giant "I am a spammer" flag!
One of our members on FightBack Networks just lost 15 sites because they didn’t have private whois, and every record had the same email address.
Whatever you do, please use fake whois (but make sure you can access the listed email address for whois verification), or use domain privacy, it costs $2 per year from godaddy or namecheap. Prices at other registrars may very.
Of course this is such an amateur move, leading you to ask why not just simply add a popup or warning when adding sites to any of the networks?
Yet it’s such a simple task that by right you should be doing as a rule of thumb anyway that creating a set rule like this just seems to be overthinking things in terms of site design. We would much prefer if the developers would continue with the wonderful work that they do in both protecting the network of networks already in place and planning and executing far more important updates such as the ones planned for the version 4.0 update.
Moving Registrar
If you’re like us though and are too lazy to create fake accounts and email addresses at whatever domain registrar you work with, simply move your private blog network domains to a registrar such as resell.biz as the registrar privacy is included for free. They would be more than happy to have your business – trust us!
SEO Host Nameservers
Know your SEO host nameservers? Well if you're not using custom nameservers then go to this URL:
http://who.is/nameserver/999.youSEOhost.com/ where "999.youSEOhost.com" is your nameserver name.
We’ve been looking at a well known SEO host, and oh yeah! The list of sites you get back are all blog network sites or autoblogs.
Easy targets for deindexing! Nicely grouped together for Google to find, and labelled "SEO Hosting".
I am also speaking from bad experiences we've had with SEO hosts... don't use them! This is something we will be monitoring closer in the future.
Just recently we had 4 sites deindexed in one day. Of course this is a rare occurrence but it’s something that could so easily have been avoided had the member in question simply taken the few minutes that was needed to protect their sites from the prying eyes of others. No doubt they’ll have learned a costly lesson from this, but just so as it doesn’t happen to you, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
- They all had the same nameservers:
- nsxx.seohost.com
-
- If you're going to use an SEO host (which you shouldn't) then use custom nameservers, otherwise you may as well be using these nameservers:
nsIamA.Spammer.com
nsIspam.GoogleHard.com
And so this leads us to a simple yet relevant question on hosting - If you don't use an SEO host, presumably you're going for low-end hosting found in forums. I wonder whether some of these places carry just as much crap as SEO hosting companies. In other words, you're lumping your site with other PBNs anyway.
So is the only link the nameservers? Or the idea that the 'big hitter' SEO hosts will be infiltrated and deindexed? Or both? Because in terms of footprints of sites based on IP I would guess you'd find A LOT of the sites on low-end hosting to be purely for spam purposes - significantly more so than a random sample size from an average hosting company. Which could then also lead do issues anyway.
Thoughts?
Yeah of course every host has tons of spammy sites. But when your nameserver is ns1.suckyWebHost.com it's a lot better than ns1.Spam-SEO-host-where-Google-knows-almost-everyone-is-an-SEO.com.
It's like waving a giant "I am a spammer" flag!