Google Indexing WhoIs Records?
Sat, 17 June, 2006 – 11:25 pm
This evening I noticed in my stats that someone had come to this site using just my name, both firstname and surname. This intrigued me as my fullname is not displayed on my website nor are there links to this site using my fullname as anchor text.
Searching in Google UK brought the main page of this site, the front page, up in position 2. Every other page in the first 10 results had both names somewhere in the results shown, but not mine. Which leads me to believe that the only reason I can be ranking for my full name is because Google has taken into account the 'registered to' part of my domain which of course is my full name.
I've checked on the same search in both MSN UK and Yahoo UK and neither rank this site on the front page, and most likely not in the first few thousand or so! This can only be a new addition to Google as I, like most people, have tried searching on my name before to see what comes up, and I've never seen my site in the results before.
So should Google be using their new position as a domain registrar to use your WhoIs details for ranking? Personally I'm not too fussed, afterall more rankings are better than less.
5 Responses to “Google Indexing WhoIs Records?”
I've noticed this too. It was on a site that did not have my name mentioned anywhere other than in the whois record for the domain the site was on, so I can only imagine they got it from the whois.
By geebandit on Jun 18, 2006
After looking at the cache it says my surname is in links to the site, but so far I've only found one site with my full name linked and that isn't even indexed in Google anyhow.
The hunt goes on
By Sarah on Jun 20, 2006
Seems that Google's search is still a bit broken as the site I'd checked, I'd just typed into Google and it didn't show up, but using the site: operator it does show.
So I guess one lowly low ranking web site has pushed mine to the top of the rankings!
By Sarah on Jun 23, 2006
Google looks on whois, becouse google must (ok, not must) know a time of expire domains for elimine buying/selling expire domains with backlinks to speed-up get up page rank.
By AZOR on Aug 21, 2006
I can understand using the domain dates, but I'm still not sure if they're using the name or address details as well.
By Sarah on Aug 25, 2006