Is It A Google Ranking Factor, WhoIs Information?

The registrar has your personal information when you register a domain.

If you don’t want the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information for your website listed in WhoIs for all to see, you can choose domain privacy protection.

There are many valid reasons why people want to protect their online privacy.

But, does WhoIs data – or the use of domain privacy – have any SEO ramifications?

WhoIs Information Is A Ranking Factor, According To The Claim

The following are some of the questions that have been raised about the potential impact of domain privacy on SEO:

Is it true that concealing your WHOIS information lowers your website’s ranking?
Will Google consider the links passing back and forth as legitimate if we have a large number of sites in our network but use domain privacy?
Is there a Google trust factor for WhoIs?

WhoIs Information As A Ranking Factor: Evidence

When Google became a domain registrar in January 2005, SEOs were immediately concerned about how registration data might be used in the ranking algorithm.

A Google spokesperson fanned the flames with this comment to the New York Times, according to Barry Schwartz, who noted the following month that a Google spokesperson had fanned the flames with this comment to the New York Times:

“While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results.”

For a few years, there was no real industry consensus on this, as SEO experts and webmasters in forums shared conflicting experiences and advice.

Matt Cutts was cited by an industry blogger in 2007 as the source of this recommendation:

“Don’t hide behind domain privacy services if you don’t have a legitimate need to.
There is evidence that search engines can see right through this ‘wall’ anyway and it makes your site less trustworthy to normal (albeit tech savvy) visitors/customers.
Make sure the whois data matches the contact details on your site and in your privacy policy, too.”

As Loren Baker said at the time:

“By not wanting to be spammed in your inbox, mailbox, phone box or possibly even via your XBox, are you telling search engines that your site cannot be trusted? I’m not sure this is the case.”

Based on what Matt Cutts wrote about the site reviews he did at Pubcon in 2006, the above blogger made that recommendation:

“Rather than any real content, most of the pages were pay-per-click (PPC) parked pages, and when I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them.
That’s relatively unusual.
Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.”

Even back then, there was no evidence that “hiding” behind domain privacy protection and keeping your home address out of the WhoIs database had any effect on ranking.

It could be interpreted as a red flag by the webspam team, as Cutts stated. However, he was referring to it appearing in conjunction with other factors.

Let’s get more current now because that was all a long time ago.

In 2016, an SEO expert published a case study on a reputable website claiming that WhoIs was a trust factor and that he could back it up with evidence.

He went on to say that the address you use in your WhoIs contact information must be in the same general region as the site you’re hosting.

Using a mailing/physical address outside of the area your site is intended to serve, or turning on domain privacy protection, will hurt your rankings. So goes the story.

We need to consider the larger context of Google’s current state.

By that time, Google had gone through a number of iterations of identity detection and verification methods — Google+, Authorship, IPv6, and so on.

This May 2014 Whiteboard Friday episode with Cyrus Shepard looks back at the various signals and clues Google was using to figure out who controlled which websites.

When we were having these discussions in 2005, the algorithms had advanced significantly.

Given that the SEO expert simply told a story with no evidence to back it up, it’s difficult to believe that Google used WhoIs/domain privacy as a trust factor in its ranking algorithms in 2016.

The Case Against Using Whois Data As A Ranking Factor

So, let’s bring it up to date.

In 2019, John Mueller responded to a tweet asking if domain privacy settings have an impact on SEO. He was unequivocal:

Google now only has a 2% share of the domain registration market.

They don’t have enough data to use as a search signal because they don’t have access to it.

Mueller was asked again in 2021 (this time on Reddit) if domain privacy settings have an impact on SEO or rankings.

“No,” he replied.

Who Is Information When It Comes To Ranking Factors: Our Opinion

No evidence exists that Google has ever used domain privacy protection as a ranking factor.

Perhaps they had intended to do so when they first became a domain registrar in 2005.

Maybe they did, for a brief moment.

If that’s the case, it won’t be for long, and they certainly aren’t using it today.

That said, attempting to conceal the identity of site owners in order to create link networks or otherwise manipulate search rankings is considered a webspam.

If this is discovered, you may face a manual penalty.

Google understands the value of online privacy, and there are many good reasons why people choose to keep their personal information out of WhoIs.

WhoIs isn’t used as a ranking criterion.