This morning I was sifting through a post from the Redfly Marketing blog of Dave Davis entitled : The 5 Easiest Ways To Get Search Engines To Trust You.
Number 5 caught my interest:
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.
Making sure all WhoIs contact information matches, besides billing and tech contact info, with your Privacy Policy and your Contact Us page seem like legit SEO recommendations, and make total sense.
But does blocking WhoIS users from accessing this contact information via privacy services really have a harmful effect on SEO and lead to the search engines not trusting you?
There are numerous reasons not to list your contact information with your domain registrar, such as blocking your contact info from telemarketers, email spammers and snail mail domain registration spammers. 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.
And, since Google is a domain registar, they should be able to see right past these blocking attempts anyway, should they not?
