Did you know that Google is officially a domain name registrar? Now Google is not hawking domains or even hosting services, so why did they have to spend the money to become a domain registrar.

Well, being an ICANN accredited registrar, they have the complete access to your domain’s who-is details and can keep track of how it changes. So, can this affect your ranking in any way?

Bill Slawski has talked about it at the SearchEngineWatch blog.

One interesting thing that I read in there was a patent application by Google which was published on March 31, 2005 which suggests how Google could use this data in ranking your site —

Domain registration could be used as a way to determine the “document inception date,” or an age associated with a page.

The expiration date of a domain could indicate the “legitimacy” of a document, with short term registrations indicating more questionable pages.

Changes, and the frequency of changes, in registration information, including contact information, hosting companies, and more, could also raise warning flags.

Information about name servers, and other sites on those name servers could also play a role in a ranking score:

A “good” name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a “bad” name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new.

However, a new ICANN law may disallow Google from using domain registration data for ranking purpose. Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) has recommended limiting the use of whois information and a definition of the the purpose of Whois. Here’s the definition of whois information they decided upon:

The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information sufficient to contact a responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration of the records associated with the domain name within a DNS nameserver.

Uh oh! Google’s plan ain’t really to use this data for purpose of providing “a contact details when there are technical problems with a web site.” But seriously, don’t you think that the boys at Google think too much?