Idea: Making Google think you have less domains than you really do.

Matt Cutts has often implied that having 50+ domains/sites can possibly lead to Google having less trust in your website(s). They discover this information through registration data.

Let's say you owned 100 sites. If you incorporated 10 LLCs, and put 10 sites into each LLC, and opened 10 PO Boxes, and had each LLC go to a different PO Box. You'd also have to have each site (or at best each group of sites) on different hosting accounts.

Would this bypass Google's penalty for ownership of large numbers of sites?

Also, maybe I missed something, but is Google currently punishing site owners with large numbers of sites? Or is Matt Cutts just saying hypothetically?

 

When did he say that?

 

Like every blog post or video he makes, he starts going on and on about "if you have 4 or 5 sites, you're fine, but if you have 50 or 100 sites, I'm hard pressed to believe you can update all those sites with quality content, so then you need to worry."

Video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395&q=matt+cutts&hl=en

Blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006-pubcon-in-vegas-thursday-site-reviews/

"My quick take is that if you’re running 50 or a 100 domains yourself, you’re fundamentally different than the chiropractor with his one site: with that many domains, each domain doesn’t always get as much loving attention, and that can really show. Ask yourself how many domains you have, and if it’s so many that lots of domains end up a bit cookie-cutter-like."

 

Thats pretty extreme.

So you are saying that Google has less trust in sites that use proxy registration details.

What your suggesting would only seem logical if you are doing some black hat technique in which you don't want google to catch on.

 

I think Google would "filter" proxy services and make them exempt from that rule, I think you know that, come on.

I don't have black-hat intentions, but I am planning to launch 120 sites (all with unique and quality content) within a year.

If they don't currently penalize for having large numbers of sites, I fear in the future they will (they will have a complex "exception" alogthrym to filter out the important sites with large numbers of domains). I want to know how to combat this.

 

Jim - as noted in this thread you can read the post on Matt's blog. Whats interesting is that Matt was able to sit at the Pubcon conference review panel and figure out pretty quickly that the guy has multiple sites.

I've read a couple of other posting on some other blogs regarding this one situation. Here's my recap.

Some guy was wondering why his site's ranking sucked for some keywords.

Matt ran a test for duplicate content (to see if that might be why his site's SERPs sucked) and the flags went up. Matt ran some other script that pulled up how many domains the guy owned.

So the key thing is that the dub content (possible cause of his crap ranking) made Matt aware he likely had too many sites.

Either way it shows that the Big G can figure out who's been naughty or to nice with their number of domain registrations! Not sure if they calculate that into a sites trust/ranking.

KEY ISSUE - No dub content on your multiple sites. You have to put some work into it!

 

I can't believe it.
Means this implies that doing more business is not a good practice.

 

I hardly think that owning a lot of websites on different domains is 'naughty.'

Let us hope that it was duplicate content being penalized, not the fact that a smart person has sought to go wide and diversify.

 

Hi, if what you say is true so Google itself can be angry because there are hundreds of country specific and other domain names registered by Google.

 

Doesn't that almost look silly to you? You really think you have to do all of that crap for Google rankings?

What are you doing that's so evil?

 

I don't believe Matt is criticizing having more then 50 websites... what he's criticizing is having so many that you end up with cookie cutter websites; Google can and does eventually figure that out. It's an issue I'm dealing with since I have well over 100... but I have 5 people working for me including myself... So thats about 20 sites apiece... as long as all of your sites are receiving human updating (or Google cannot tell the difference,) then you should be fine irregardless of the quantity.

 

I agree with perdrix, the whole point of Matt mentioning 50+ sites was that to maintain all these 50+ sites with love and care as you would if you had 4 or 5 is difficult. So in the long run, you either burn out and all of your 50+ sites crap out or you maintain 4 or 5 decently and the rest of them become the restover.

 

Did you guys read the entire entry? It is clear that he means you should worry if you have a lot of sites cuz your content would suck, and not cuz google won't trust your site. In the comments section he clarifies:

"Back to multiple sites: multiple sites by themselves aren’t bad. Heck, it’s easy to get several domains if you register typos of your main domain and 301/permanent redirect them to your main domain (Google often gets domains like gogle.com because someone will register them in bad-faith and then we end up with them). But if you’ve got that many sites and they’re all separate, it’s hard to find the time to develop all those standalone sites well unless, as you mention, you never sleep."

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006-pubcon-in-vegas-thursday-site-reviews/#comment-90040

 

Hope that clears things up a little

 

maintaining 5 sites is hard enought I don't know how someone will maintain 50 or 100....

 

Why waste your money on creating on LLC's when you could just register each domain privately. I doubt there is penalty for private registration.

 

You can't be serious, can you?

1. There has been speculation that Google might be able to see through your private registrations with the "domain tracking" software Matt Cutts had at PubCon.

2. Google WILL know which domains you own if you use the same LLC because if you only have one LLC, then you can only have one Adsense, and if you have all your sites on one Adsense, Google will know which sites you own. You need to have all your sites on multiple Adsense accounts, and you need multiple LLCs to do this. People like Shoemoney and others have said it's best to have multiple Adsense accounts.

 

Let's see how silly I look when you get banned for nothing, as many others have by Google.

Google is vicious and unforgiving and you have to always been paranoid.

 

I hope what you're saying is the case. It really makes it sound like Google is weighing the possibility that having multiple sites is grounds for SE penalties.

 

If all your sites offer good quality content I doubt the number of sites would matter. 1 site or 1000 sites. Unless your sites were all garbage MFA or some nonsense like that but if you have something worthing reading or looking at I doubt you'll get penalized.