undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • SEO Q&A

      Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Digital Marketing
  3. Affiliate Marketing
  4. Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?

Affiliate Marketing
4
6
2.9k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • tennisexpress
    tennisexpress last edited by Feb 5, 2013, 3:59 PM

    Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank?

    We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past.

    We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains.

    Thanks for looking!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Cyrus-Shepard
      Cyrus-Shepard last edited by Feb 8, 2013, 5:32 AM Feb 8, 2013, 5:32 AM

      Google has trended towards devaluing links between domains with "Administrative Relationships." It's a good bet that they can figure out you own both domains.

      That said, it's only a devaluation. The links still count - just not as much. Think of it more like internal anchor text from your own site. Like Nakul said, since it's only one domain, you're not going to suffer a "link-wheel" scheme penalty or anything similar. It's natural and normal for sister sites to link to one another - even groups of sister sites. But the links likely won't help as much as external links form outside sites.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • tennisexpress
        tennisexpress @NakulGoyal last edited by Feb 6, 2013, 9:23 PM Feb 6, 2013, 9:23 PM

        You are correct. Ideally, we'd be building information sites where consumers could get real information regarding our brand and our products.

        I like the idea. We'd be bringing traffic to our main e-commerce site regardless of what Google thinks due to the fact other sites would link to our information, our reader base would be interested in our information and therefore take a closer look at our products,and more.

        Thank you for the suggestion and your answer.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • tennisexpress
          tennisexpress @donford last edited by Feb 6, 2013, 9:44 PM Feb 6, 2013, 9:14 PM

          Right. We would not be hosting the site on the same server as our ecommerce website. We just want to confirm whether or not domain owner information has any relevance to SEO.

          So you're saying that Google might or might not look at domain owner information, and it might play a small role in SEO rank, but to have a differing linking C-Block is much more important.

          Thank you for your answer!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • NakulGoyal
            NakulGoyal last edited by Feb 6, 2013, 9:23 PM Feb 6, 2013, 3:14 AM

            I'd also recommend to look at your blog not just for SEO reasons as a link that helps towards SEO, but as your customer acquisition and brand awareness tool. The SEO Benefit is a freebie (maybe an essential freebie) that you get out of it. So if you think of this blog with this attitude, you'll end up building a great blog with tons of content, great readership and so on.

            And to directly answer your question, honestly since it's just 1 domain name, I would not worry about it too much. As donford set, you'll technically get a little bit more value if this blog was hosted on a different Class C IP. Other then that, I wouldn't worry much about changing registrars etc. Not a big deal, however if it bothers you and you'd like to shift the domain to a different registrar, that's okay as well. Again, I would not stress much on this small issue.

            I hope this helps.

            tennisexpress 1 Reply Last reply Feb 6, 2013, 9:23 PM Reply Quote 1
            • donford
              donford last edited by Feb 6, 2013, 9:23 PM Feb 5, 2013, 9:45 PM

              Hello,

              Google certainly looks at some register information. Its been long known factors like domain age, and length of ownership have some bearing. About 8 years ago Google became a domain register which now allows them a better level of access to the domain whois information. One may also deduce that with the Panda and Penguin updates seeing Google cracking down on link rings, spam sites, that Google is certainly using this information.

              I laid out that information for you so I could say this. Even though Google may know you are the same owner of multiple domains, it is very unlikely that you'll receive any sort of extra penalty for operating 2 sites from the same server. However, remember that page rank and domain authority relates to linking C-Blocks, and being on the same server would reduce that link metric by 1 domain.

              Hope that makes sense

              tennisexpress 1 Reply Last reply Feb 6, 2013, 9:14 PM Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              1 out of 6
              • First post
                1/6
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              Browse Questions

              Explore more categories

              • Moz Tools

                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

              • SEO Tactics

                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

              • Community

                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

              • Digital Marketing

                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

              • Research & Trends

                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

              • Support

                Connect on product support and feature requests.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • HandyWoman

                Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic

                Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com.  It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links.  It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks.  However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links.  Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage.  Again, the site's totally different.   And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this:  this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right?  Is this prevalent on the internet?  Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet?  And how do I report him?   I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords.  (Disclosure:  I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

                Affiliate Marketing | Oct 31, 2019, 4:33 PM | HandyWoman
                1
              • Benavest

                What's the best way to go about making Duplicate Content Pages on my domain for affiliates?

                Hello, I would like to make a bunch of duplicate pages of my site's Home Page, that way affiliates of mine can have a page of their own with links specialized to themselves littered throughout the page. What's the best practice going about this without jeopardizing domain authority from tons of duplicate content signals firing off?

                Affiliate Marketing | Aug 4, 2017, 12:29 PM | Benavest
                0
              • Ben_Malkin_Develo

                Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice

                I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.

                Affiliate Marketing | Apr 18, 2016, 12:10 PM | Ben_Malkin_Develo
                0
              • gamesecure

                How to track Affiliate Clicks to Google Analytics

                Hi, We would like to track the affiliate link clicks. Is there any way to track it from Google Analytic? Rajiv

                Affiliate Marketing | Jun 30, 2015, 12:23 PM | gamesecure
                0
              • NHA_DistanceLearning

                Why do my Google Analytics campaign URLs not show up in reports?

                Hi guys, I'm puzzled because of my affiliate campaign URLs not showing up properly in my Google Analytics reports. I'll try to explain what I did and I hope some of you can provide advice on how to proceed from there on. What do I want to do?
                Actually, what I want to do is quite simple. I tagged a few URLs for Google Analytics to show up in my campaign reports. I used the URL builder to do so. Example: http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Is that the entire URL?
                Uhm, no. Because of the active de-duplication script on our website, I need to put some characters in front of it: **www.nhad.de/affiliate.aspx?NETWORK=ZANOX&NEXTURL=**http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139. Yikes. Yes, I know. What do I see?
                Basically, when I paste the above url and run it in (for example) Chrome, only this shows up in my browser: www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate. In my Analytics reports, the campaign URL is not recognised, just the source in my traffic report. The medium is indicated with 'not set'. What am I doing wrong, and what can I do to make my campaigns appear in Analytics? Best, Bas

                Affiliate Marketing | May 19, 2014, 3:46 AM | NHA_DistanceLearning
                0
              • ATIseo

                Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google

                We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.

                Affiliate Marketing | Mar 20, 2013, 12:33 PM | ATIseo
                0
              • bizzer

                In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?

                I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense.  If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site.  But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is  high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?

                Affiliate Marketing | Sep 2, 2012, 12:44 AM | bizzer
                0
              • zeepartner

                How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?

                hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?

                Affiliate Marketing | Jan 25, 2012, 10:09 AM | zeepartner
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter

              Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.