Macalua.com

Have someone optimize a site and chances are he’ll begin work on the two areas he’s familiar with: offpage and onpage. Domains are usually treated as a given, meaning “there’s nothing I can do about that now”. We’ve forgotten that there might actually be untapped optimization opportunities at the domain and host level. This will become increasingly important. Being a registrar, Google is able to see more domain-level data than a normal WHOIS level probe.

Here’s a list of domain trust and spam signals that I think search engines might be looking out for:

• Domain registrar used - since spammers most often follow the path of least economic resistance, would domains bought through more expensive registrars like Yahoo! Domains be considered more trustworthy than say, bulk domain retailers?
• Domain registration length (in years) - throwaway domains tend to be registered for 1 year only; multiple year domain registrations may indicate that the entity buying the domain is serious about his or her business.
• Identity used in domain registration - does the registrant have domains hosting spammy sites or has he bought domains that turned spammy before? Names and email addresses can be spoofed, but what if Google could dig down to the IP level?
• Bogus registration information - does your zip code tally with the state and your phone/fax number? Will your address return a valid hit when doing a local search? False information on these forms may lead to closer scrutiny by the search engines.
• Domain extension - go with a ccTLD if you’re optimizing for a particular country/region; otherwise, try to go with a .COM. The search engines have said that they don’t discriminate against a particular extension, but with the amount of spam on .INFO domains (spammers tend to use this as they’re cheaper than the usual TLDs), will search engines look at .INFO domains more closely?
• IP history of host - what’s the subscriber base of the hosting company? Do they host more spam sites than clean ones? With unlimited domain addons becoming standard feature, more and more webmasters are turning to these hosting companies to host their spam sites - if you host your legit site on one of these companies, will search engines trust you less?

Call it FUD. But if you want to play the “I want to appear natural” game, you have to do so too at the domain level.