Why Google Is A Domain Registrar

It's been 18 months since Google became a domain registrar, a move that initially shook up the domain and hosting businesses amid the notion that Google might make domain names available for free. Before long, Google watchers advanced an alternate theory: that Google would use its access to the list of recently sold domains to clean up its search results, resetting a site's PageRank when its domain changes hands.

That theory has now been confirmed, thanks to the sharp-eyes of Kevin Murphy at Texturbation, who noted comments by Google employee (and ICANN chair) Vint Cerf in the recent domain marketplace discussion at ICANN's conference in Marrakech. Here's the cogent excerpt (from a much longer transcript):

VINT CERF: When a domain name has expired, and then it's re-assigned to someone else, what happens to the SOA (Start of Authority) record for that domain name as to its start date? Does that change automatically or does it stay the same or are there circumstances where a domain name changes hands but it doesn't look like it has if you are looking at its birth date?

PAT KANE: If a name is transferred, the date stays the same.

VINT CERF: Okay. So that's a problem for Google. And it's one of the reasons that we became a registrar, but it didn't help. We were hoping that we could detect that something had changed hands and that, therefore, we should invalidate a lot of things sitting in the cache that referred to the former content of that domain name.

PAUL STAHURA (eNom): I can answer that. You can still do that because you can monitor the WHOIS and if you see the WHOIS change, then you note the date.

At that point Vint says he'll continue discussion after the session. Google doesn't appear to be automatically resetting PageRank once a site changes hands - I haven't seen that in any of my domain purchases or sales - but that clearly appears to be what it had in mind in becoming a registrar. That has implications for the secondary market, as we noted last year in a post at Netcraft:

Given the importance of Google traffic in a site's success and profitability, a high PageRank makes a domain more attractive to buyers, who will pay a premium for added visibility in Google. ... As a registrar, Google would be able to negotiate access to a centralized list of expiring and resold domains (known as the "batch pool"), and then know when to reset PageRank on a domain that has changed hands. The site would then have earn its position in Google's rankings, rather than inheriting the "Googlejuice" of the previous owner. While that would lead to less link spam in Google's rankings, it has implications for web site owners selling a site with an established PageRank. If the strong PageRank disappears once the domain changes hands, the buyer may be less likely to offer a premium for visibility in Google.

I still regularly see PageRank used as a metric in sales of domains, sites and links at forums like Digital Point and SitePoint, which are populated by a pretty savvy crowd of site owners.

What's surprising is Cerf's statement that Google has trouble identifying when a site has changed hands. As Paul Stahura mentioned to Cerf, that information is available if Google is keen enough to find it. Given the volume of domain sales these days, the key issue is probably whether they're able to automate the process.

  Posted by RichM July 5, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter

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Why Google Is A Domain Registrar - Jul 05, 2006





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