Just read this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080604/ap_on_hi_te/tec_dangerous_domains New report identifies dangerous Web domains This sucks, i have several .info doamins. And I cant really get any of these.
Umm actually this was the results of the study done by McAfee. Its usually because domain owners can find these extensions cheaply. Majority of the owners use such sites for malware and or the dumb phamaceutical, genital enlargement sites. So .info can be risky but it is not the top one. .hk - 19.2% .cn - 11.8% .info - 11.7 .ro - 6.8% .ru - 6% .com 5% Least risky are .gov .au .jp
I guess the part that bothers me is when my .info domains show up in search results, some people might choose not to click on them because of this study/article.
Certainly not good for the .info domains. .info's are affordable and disposable so its no wonder hackers, etc. use them for their dirty deeds.
I would say the effect that study could have on something like clicking a .info domain is quite small and anyway it would pass quickly.
As well as cn. I know a few Russians who have over 10k's of them. They were priced(maybe still is) somewhere around 15c.
It is nice reading, cn and info I agree can easily be the most dangerous as there are no prerequisites to apply. But hk struck me as strange as they do have more stringent rules for the applications of hk domains.
imo the biggest spammer is india (in domain), hk domain is impossible, you need HK id card to register, i come from Hong Kong, China owns the most internet users in the world. so the report is not real, no doubt.
Doesnt surprise me about .au extension being less risky, its one of the most regulated extensions! Common sense should tell you that 99.99999999 % didnt read that article.
Nope and it has been registered since 2004. Go to the info at whois.net. No pages showing in the archive.org either. Some person in Italy has it. I concur. I am sure the majority of WWW/Net users will not ever come across this article to know better.
I just received this in my weekly SEO newsletter. Makes some eye opening reading how Google regards .info's Does your domain name prevent your website from getting high rankings? The top level domain of your website can have an influence on your website rankings. Last week, many websites with a special top level domain were delisted from Google's search results. No more visitors from Google. What has happened? Last week, many webmasters observed that all of their websites with an .info domain name disappeared from Google's search results. Some websites removed traffic drops from several hundreds of visitors per day to zero visitors per day. It seemed that all websites that used the .info top level domain had been removed from Google's index. A few days later, the websites with the .info domains reappeared in Google's search results. Why did this happen? It looks as if Google updated its filters for special domain names and went a little too far. Earlier this year, the head of Google's anti-spam team made the following statement: "A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations." Domain names with a .info ending have been available for 99 Cent for some time. It's likely that very many .info domain names have been purchased for spamming purposes. Google might have intended to block .info domains that spam and a bug in the algorithm wiped all .info domains from Google's results. Fortunately, Google's engineers fixed the bug within days. What does this mean for your website? Filtering all .info domains just because many of them are used for spamming is a very drastic measure. Although Google doesn't do this, it's clear that there is some kind of filter for these domains. If you want to succeed with your online business, it might be better to use a .com domain or the local top level domain of your country instead of a .info domain. In addition to your domain name, many more factors influence the position of your website in Google's search results. Analyze your website now to find out which elements of your website can cause problems with Google.