Good morning all,

I’m writing this as a continuation to my Domain Name Realtors series. Josh Catone takes it from Associated Press that Whois searches might be soon retired by ICANN. Whois searches, if you don’t already know, enables anyone on the net to search for the details of an owner of a particular website.

I’ve picked out certain statements by Catone -

Privacy advocates in favor of shutting down the database feel that individuals should not be forced to give out private information — which is then potentially available to spammers or scam artists — in order to register a domain name on the Internet. Those who want to keep the Whois database operational, feel that it is a valuable tool for doing business and making sure you know who you are dealing with.

And AP -

Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud and hacking. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings for Web site hosting and other services.

Now lets examine this…

If Whois shuts down, then we’ll be left with no option to find out the details of the owner of a domain name. The privacy of a domain owner will be guaranteed.  But it will also mean that there is now way of tracking down owners of illegal websites. It will be good and bad for domain name realtors. The realtors will not be able to form a pattern of domain names based on the previous ones obtained by a particular person. But it will be good in the sense that no one will be able to track down a particular realtor, who happens to be the owner of many domains. He can deny being a realtor.

Another implication is the complete privacy of anyone starting a website. No one will know the details of the owner, until and unless he/she himself/herself decides to reveal it. Pretty neat eh? Terrorists are going to have a ball

Now what COULD be done, is that the amount of information revealed to public searchers be limited to name and email. Or make Whois a membership device - with only paid members being able to search. A total shut down of the Whois database will mean utter chaos, and heaven knows what.

Lets hope ICANN is reading…

Technorati Tags: WHOIS, ICANN, Whois shut down

Hi all,

Matt Cutts, the porn-cookie-guy from Google, confirmed last week that the massive Google Page Rank changes seen throughout the web, which affected especially bloggers, was due to the selling and buying of links on the Internet.

Matt Cutts replied to an email by Search Engine Journal and said thus -

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

Very many sites had been affected by the PR update. Most of the sites losing PR. Even BloggingIndia had been affected in the second wave of PR updates - our PR went very "beary" and jumped to 1 from 4. I’m not very concerned, because I’m more interested in writing, and hearing your say.

A question I had in mind, however, after Matt Cutt’s email, is whether Google is awarding sites which had not participated in link ads. I don’t know, but many sites, with no posts, have jumped from PR 0 to PR 3 or PR 4. BloggingIndia as such did not participate in any link ads, but still our PR lowered.

Additionally, a common phenomenon on the internet is that of all websites focusing on Search Engine Optimization losing Page Rank. Now this might be the reason why BloggingIndia lost a lot of Page Rank…

Lets hope for some more information from Matt!

Technorati Tags: matt cutts, pr update, pr loss, google pr, pagerank