Does Google check Whois

[iwebdevnl]

Hello everyone,

I own quite a lot of website active in the same niche and sometimes targeting the same keywords, these sites are hosted at different IP's. But they all have the same Whois details, i was wondering if Google checks the Whois-data? And if it affects the serp's?

Regards,

Yannick

[Bryan_Loconto]

No. Googles SERP data does not reflect the data on Whois, Google's ranking data has many factors. Whois is not one of them.

[TheeDigital]

What Bryan said.  Who-Is is not a factor in the search algorithm.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Let me answer the question another way. To be honest, Google most likely doesn't look at Whois data - they don't need to (more on this below).

The real question is... Does Google know what websites are associated with you? Do they care? And does this factor into ranking?

The answer to the first question is most likely yes. For one, Google became an ICANN registrar (just like Godaddy) in 2006. This means they have first look access to all newly registered domain names. There are also a million other ways to determine relationships between websites, such as shared IPs, Analytic codes, link patterns and so on.

But do they care? We don't have hard data on this, but Google reps have made comments in the past that links between sites that have an "administrative" relationship aren't as valuable. That's why you see SEOs measuring links from unique C-blocks. (This is one of the metrics in the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis Report).

This is one of the ways Google is able to sniff out link networks. If you own a bunch of sites, and you engage in aggressive inter-linking between these sites, those links are likely not going to count for much, and could even hurt you.

In the end, this means the value of the links from sites you own may not be as strong as links from outside your network. And aggressive interlinking between your sites - especially with aggressive anchor text, could get you in trouble.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.