Google removes over 11 million .co.cc domains from its search

[Mark]

Google removes over 11 million .co.cc domains from its search

Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages - .co.cc are bigger than .org or .uk, on the basis that most of them are far too spammy.

The .co.cc space is not an officially authorised second-level domain like .co.uk or .com.au. Rather, it's offered independently by a Korean company that just happens to own the domain name "co.cc" so infact it's not really a domain atall, just a subdomain of theirs - that you "own". Google classes the firm as a "freehost", and has exercised its right to block the whole domain.

According to a recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, almost twice the number found under any other extension. That was due to a large number of attacks originating from .co.cc addresses.

The company claims to have 11,383,736 registered domains and 5,731,278 user accounts. That would make it one of the largest domain extensions in the world, bigger than both .org and .uk by over two million domains.

The .cc top-level domain belongs to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google's changes.

[Drumm]

Gutted Mark. As a sidenote, if you want to make a private unindexed website from Google/Bing (As Bing steal their results) Here's your way down that route.