Follow up on “Google knows all your sites”

The buzz about Google knowing all your sites is still going strong. Some are still questioning if Google can see behind private registrations. Many has suggested that in some way or another Google is profiling webmasters. If you’re getting paranoid over all of this I strongly suggest you to continue reading this post.

Honestly I’ve got strong doubts that Google are really profiling webmasters. And I’ve got a very valid reason for this.

To do a long story short I can say that within the past 5 months I’ve had two sites banned from Google. They were both really alike just on different topics. The interesting thing is that from the first one getting banned three months went by before the second one was banned. They were 100% connected meaning same registration, ip, template, adsense account and even visibly interlinked. What makes it all even more interesting is that I’ve got a third one.. And it hasn’t been banned!

Yesterday I posted a comment here which I’ve quoted below. In that I told how anyone could’ve looked up what Matt Cutts did. This was to suggest that Matt Cutts didn’t necessarily have a “profile of webmaster” that he just checked under the site review session.

I decided to find the actual domain being reviewed at the session. And then I checked how easy it would be to find the other domains. The result was approx. 2 minutes and I had a bunch of them.

The process:
- lookup ip for the domain
- check for other domains on ip (none)
- check for domains on surrounding ip’s (1 domain on each)
- check the span of the ip block (1 C class - assigned to the corp. having the first domain)

This can be done by anybody without special tools. MSN live has the ‘ip:’ operator (not perfect). Domaintools.com has a reverse ip lookup tool (better than MSN’s).

If you’re still in total paranoia because of all this then go and check out this recent post by Andy Hagans where he suggests some ways you can improve the anonymity of your websites.

Only big problem in my opinion is what I pretty much wrote in my previous post on this subject:

What you should look for when tracking down websites is the one kind of footprints which is impossible to hide. It’s all about who benefits from the website. This can be in many ways e.g. revenue, links etc. This can of course give some false positives but only very few I believe.

With that I mean that if Google really is profiling webmasters I’d say they’d be stupid not to profile them based on the money stream. There isn’t really that many popular advertising and affiliate networks, so they wouldn’t need to analyze much to connect most websites to webmasters. So to hide this kind of information it would take multiple advertising and affiliate accounts which you probably need multiple corporations / persons to obtain. So takes a lot of effort to really hide if that’s what you want to do.

Anyway I wouldn’t worry much about all this but take your precautions when possible!