On Saturday, July 23, 2005, 11:50:19 AM, Justin Mason wrote:
- ------- Forwarded Message
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 22:11:13 -0600 From: Marcia Blake
This comes to us fresh from the July GoDaddy.com newsletter (naturally, in a bit trying to sell longer domain registration terms on GuessWhere):
Google recently filed United States Patent Application 20050071741. As part of that application, Google made apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam, stating:
"Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."
Domains registered for longer periods give the indication, true or not, that their owner is legitimate. Google uses a domain's length of registration when indexing and ranking a Web site for inclusion in their organic search results.
Some questions and comments:
1. How prevalent are spams using search engine listings as their target URI? If it's significant, it could be costing google money and messing up search engine results in general, so there could be an incentive for them to try to stop it.
2. Spammers could register domains for longer periods but that would raise their costs somewhat. Their domain registration costs may or may not be insignificant. They seem to register dozens or hundreds at a time, repeatedly, so it seems that registration costs may not be too much of an impediment.
3. Spammers could stop using search engine spam hosting (as it were) and just use regular spam hosting in the various forms they're doing now, or shift to more "shifty" hosting.
Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.