The Return of Google's WHOIS Feature

By Navneet Kaushal - Sat, 04/19/2008 - 16:18

It's back again!

Google had launched an application in January 2004 called WHOIS, that was later withdrawn. However, now according to Matt Cutts, the WHOIS feature has been released again.

By entering a simplistic web address such as whois google.com, a user would be able to know the creation and the expiration date of the domain.

However, as of now the WHOIS data is not being sent in real time and it would mean that Google must be caching the information from some other source.

There has been a lot of speculation that the WHOIS data is being used by Google for its ranking algorithms. If this data is indeed applied in the rank measuring algorithms, then there is a possibility that the domains which have been registered for a longer period may be given additional weightage (as we always thought it to be!).

Comments

News Tags: Search, Google, search engines, Domains, WHOIS, domain names

About the author:
Nav is the founder and CEO of PageTraffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals.

Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the "Best Articles" section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.

2 Comments

By Shams (WPN reader) - Mon, 04/21/2008 - 09:08

Good info.

By Naughty (WPN reader) - Mon, 04/21/2008 - 02:05

Whois info

Navneet,
I am almost certain that google is using the whois info for calculating their SERP result. Assuming all other factors being equal, a back link from a site with same whois is definitely given less value than from a different whois.

Anyway, thanks for the news.