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06 July 2011, 12:12

No more Googling for .co.cc domains

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No co.cc screenshot
Zoom No .co.cc sites to be found in Google's search index
Google has followed through on a previously announced plan to block "bulk subdomain services"; the entire .co.cc subdomain has been removed from Google's search index. In June, Google announced it was modifying its malware detection system to identify subdomain services which allow criminals to register thousands of domains at a time for hosting malware and fake anti-virus software.

The co.cc subdomain is owned by a Korean company and offers 2 domains for free and bulk registration of 15,000 domains for $1,000. According to its own statistics, co.cc hosts over eleven million domains. Google has not announced its removal of co.cc, but Matt Cutts, head of the Google's webspam team, wrote that, although there were a lot of high quality freehosting services out there, "if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole".

.cc is the country code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The co.cc service is not an official subdomain of .cc, like .co.uk or .org.uk, but a privately registered service. Other users of .cc are not affected; the Arduino.cc domain for the open source electronics platform is not affected by Google's index changes and can still be searched for.

(djwm)

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