Competitive Webmastering & Domain Jujitsu: 7 Tips to Keep Your Network Hidden
Well I hate to make two posts sucking up to the same guy in one day… but I have long admired Graywolf for continuously bringing up issues about Google’s massive amounts of data, and their (sometimes) mismanaging of it. My personal opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to protect their data on users — they don’t anonymize it, and they keep it virtually forever; this is just begging for abuse 
But today I want to touch a bit on the data they have on us webmasters. If you’re an affiliate or have been in the SEO game for a while, chances are good that you have a dozen or more sites. If you do, please know that Google is trying to build an SEO rap sheet on you.
Graywolf posts a sort of open letter to Matt Cutts in this post:
…ask the question thatâs on everybodyâs mind regarding the site review session,
can Google see behind a private registration, and what are some
general-ish guidelines about owning multiple domains people should keep
in mind.
That’s been weighing on my mind too, a bit. I fall into the "not-entirely-tinfoil-hat-but-not-entirely-naive-either" camp, so I’ve taken some precautions, but probably need to be a bit more cautious than I am.
Why is this an issue? The AU Interactive blog has a short recap:
At Pubcon
last week during one of the sessions, Matt Cutts was reviewing an
attendeeâs website and using his laptop (which was tunneled into
Googleâs brain I assume), looked up all the domains this person owned
and called him out on it, suggesting that a number of other websites he owned looked spammy.
Google has proven that they don’t mind collateral damage if overall relevancy is improved. In this case, that means that if you have a lot of spammy sites, that’s going to help them predict whether or not a new site you launch is also spammy. Let’s skip past the whole "is this fair?" discussion and talk about how to hide your network from Big Brother.
6 Tips to Keep Your Large Network of Sites Where You Want Them — Behind Smoke and Mirrors, and Unassociated
- Use private registration. This is a best practice for competitive webmastering anyway.
- Register at multiple registrars. This is one of those arbitrary things — anything you can arbitrarily differ, differ.
- Andy H. vs. A. Hagans vs. Andy Hagans Link Building LLC. Since Google is a registrar now, they can see right through private registrations (I think). If you have multiple LLCs or partners you can put them in different companies’ or partners’ names, as well. Note that I’m not suggesting you use fake names / addresses in WHOIS — you can lose your domain this way due to ICANN rules.
- Use different hosts. Another one of those arbitrary things — anything you can arbitrarily differ, differ. And again a best practice for competitive webmastering anyway.
- Don’t use the same link profile twice. Yet again a normal best practice. While you’re at it, avoid design, coding, or outbound link footprints.
- if you’re REALLY paranoid, you may also want to only visit your own sites when: a) logged out of Google, and b) on a proxy.
Most of these tips overlap with "how to hide your site portfolio from other SEOs", too. No-brainers.
*hat tip to John Andrews for coming up with the term "competitive webmastering" — it’s a better phrase than "strategic SEO cum business" and I think it’s going to stick.
*update, tip #7: how did I forget this one? Don’t claim all of your sites with Google Sitemaps in a single Google account.