back to article Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results

Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are far too "spammy". google-co-cc 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 (http://co.cc/) that …

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  1. Shonko Kid
    Devil

    I smell a war brewing..

    between Google and ICANN; When is a registered domain not a registered domain? when it doesn't show up in an explicit google search for it.

    So, if I owned a .co.cc domain, how much would I have to pay Google to have them return it in their results? If there was a free for all in TLDs, then you can bet Google will be looking at how best to 'monetize' it, purely for the good of their users mind, nothing evil, never anything evil...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Devil

      That is still second level domains

      Watch when it dumps .co or something like that which is "the latest and greatest ploy to extract money". That it will be handbags at dawn with ICANN.

    2. Wyrdness
      WTF?

      What's ICANN go to do with it?

      Did you RTFA? The second sentence says "The .co.cc space is not an officially authorised second-level domain like .co.uk or .com.au". Therefore it's outside ICANN's remit.

      Google's search results are simply Google's opinion of what might be relevant to the users search terms. They are not legally obliged to return any particular results.

    3. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

      This isn't quite like that though

      Google are blocking the second level domain, not the top level, so this is akin to them blocking scummyspammer.com, the block wouldn't be on .com, it also wouldn't affect scummyspammer.net, etc.

      The confusion arises because .co.cc looks like the top level domain that many countries use, e.g. .co.uk, which actually is a TLD, whereas .co.cc isn't.

      There is only one .co.cc domain, so you couldn't own 'one', you could potentially buy it from the Korean ISP who currently owns it, or more likely register a subdomain with them, such as iamnotaspammerhonest.co.cc. The domain remains in the hands of this single company, whose business model appears to be to sell portions of their namespace onto others without any sort of checks on their use.

      Far play to google for blocking it I say - it sounds like this one domain is a huge portal for spam and scams.

  2. David Gosnell

    +1 button

    Amused their home page has a Google "+1" rate-this-page button.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Conrad Longmore
    Thumb Up

    Good riddance

    Good riddance. Perhaps they can dump .cz.cc too?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yes, but...

      .... what about cx.cc and cz.cc

      1. David Barrett

        read article again

        Unaffected.

  5. Luke McCarthy

    co.cc block

    Had to say it :-)

    1. Dylan Fahey
      Paris Hilton

      wonderful

      That was funny, made my day!

      For Paris, she's never met a co.cc she didn't like.

  6. Paul Johnston
    Thumb Up

    Indeed good riddance

    I've been called to students machines which have shown problems after they started accessing documents and pages from .co.cc sites.

    They purported to be research articles and when I asked them why it was published from a small island off the coast of Australia rather than a normal location of research papers i.e. the University doing it they said "Oh we just googled "xyz" and it seemed interesting.

    Told them not to click on links from addresses like those again.

    1. kmitchell3
      Unhappy

      Get your facts straight.

      There is nothing wrong with the .cc from the tiny Australian territory of the Cocos Islands. It is the .co.cc that is the problem. Read the article again, and properly.

      If I was from the University in question, I would fire you for gross incompetence.

  7. Andy Fletcher

    The title of this story is totally misleading

    So Google have dumped a domain that's full of shite. Good on them. They should do more of it. I thought something exciting mught have happened, like an entire extension being blocked.

  8. Zog The Undeniable
    Facepalm

    Ironically

    Most of our forum spam comes from GMail addresses. I am considering blocking those.

    1. Sir Cosmo Bonsor

      But

      are most of the Gmail addresses you see spammers? That's more the point here.

      Still, yes, the irony isn't lost.

  9. Ben Rosenthal

    .co.ck

    cook islands are still okay though?

    1. /dev/null
      Happy

      Yes

      Just checked, and trashbat.co.ck is still there.

  10. Kai Hauschildt
    Joke

    subdomain sans google indexing

    So if i wanr a subdomain (for free even) that google ignores this sounds like the perfect place.

    I have nothing against google, mind (international treaties and laws against certain items of mass destruction being what they are), but this sounds like a good place for anything tinfoil related.

  11. Chris Rowland

    No Ambition

    A forum I moderate has blocked *.cn

    The number of spam registrations dropped to almost nothing.

  12. Inachu
    IT Angle

    I can start hearing the crying now.

    Oh no!!!! I paid millions for link famrs on those domains to raise my relevance on search engines and now this will just kill my site!

    HAHAHAAHAHAHA PWNED!!!

    COM=company if you want to do business stick with .com site you noobs!

    1. DannyAston
      Facepalm

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      Spoken like a true idiot.

    2. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

      No.

      Register with your own country's registrar. If you don't live in the US, why would you want your domain to be governed by the rules of a US registrar? I live in the UK, so if I wanted a domain for a UK business, I would register a .co.uk domain. This also has the advantage of me not being (quite so) ripped off for the price of the domain registration, which is essentially the glorified electronic equivalent of putting your company's name in the Yellow Pages.

      1. Anteaus

        @LoyalCommenter

        You obviously haven't heard of the cookie ruling, the latest piece of eureaucrackpotcy.

        There are now some very solid arguments for registering and hosting outside of the EU, and possibly outside ot the USA too, where damages claims for lack of 'accessibility' are a serious risk.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @Anteaus...

          ...of course if you have any sort of login on your US hosted site, you have checked your obligations under the data protection act about exporting to non EU countries.

  13. The Alpha Klutz

    Good idea

    These free subdomain services seem to attract spammers and script kiddies like a park bench attracts dog shit.

    You could block another 11 million and not loose anything relevant.

  14. IGnatius T Foobar

    Another one

    Good riddance to co.cc -- now there's one that's even more problematic, it's called "facebook.com" and I hope everyone will block it as soon as possible.

    1. Steve the Cynic
      WTF?

      Yeah, block facebook.com

      and take out the entirety of CodeMasters' web presence...

      Yes folks, www.codemasters.com redirects to a facebook page. Each game then has its own separate page.

      I have only one question, really...

      Why?

      1. lee davies 1
        Devil

        Look it up

        http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=245195094069&topic=15081

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Why?"

        Because a website takes time and therefore money for someone to run it. I very much doubt that the companies "web presence" is key in their marketing, as most games are sold following press coverage at trade shows, or recommendations on forums, game review sites, etc. Trailers are all on TV or Youtube, and will likely go viral among the gaming community.

        So why not forget the whole notion of maintaining a website and just slap up a Facebook page for the 1% of their customers who will actually bother to check?

        I'm no fan of Facebook, but it makes perfect sense. And if Facebook ever goes down, people are going to be more angry at Facebook than they are at Codemasters. So there's almost no risk.

  15. Dom 3

    Good. And now for .uk.com?

    That is all.

  16. James Gosling
    Happy

    DEL *.CO.CC

    Think of the disk space they will save!

  17. Lewis Burgess
    Devil

    Maybe less Fake AV in the Google results?

    Perhaps we'll see slightly less FakeAV popping up in the Google Image searches then - which appears to be the primary way that our users get duped and kicks Sophos in to a hissy fit many times a day having to deal with it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Ref: Image search

      Actually, it won't affect the BH SEO campaigns in Google Image search, nor indeed, campaigns in other Google search areas. These aren't linking directly to the *.cc, *.ms etc sites, but are using MITMs to do it.

      You can identify these quite easily, as the image is loaded and displayed from one site, and the href leads to a second completely unrelated site (this second site then performs the redirect when it detects a Google Image etc, referrer string).

      As for this article, hopefully they'll also drop the entire *.cc, *.ms, *.vg TLDS, taking out the rest of the redirect sources (.cz.cc, .ce.ms etc) in one go.

  18. Alan Brown Silver badge

    delete *.cc and be done with it.

    The TLD was assigned fraudulently in the first place.

    .CC has a LONG history and little of it is honourable.

    1. Robert Baker
      FAIL

      delete .cc?

      That will piss off customers of openmail.cc, to name but one legitimate service...

  19. Mikel

    Oh, somebody please skill me up.

    Why would ICANN think they had some influence over the content of Google's website? I mean, I know it's the world's biggest family of sites and all that, but it's still just a website and ICANN just doesn't exert that level of control over the content of hosts - nor even the services that run on them. Certainly not on the -lack- of content on some such site, which is what this is. That's not what they do.

    If you don't like what you find on Google.com, just don't go there. Don't try whining to daddy that they're ignoring your site in their index. It's their site and they're no more obligated to link to your content than you are to link to theirs.

  20. Shannon Jacobs
    Holmes

    Moderately good first step, but only the symptom

    The breeding of ultra-cheap domains is actually a slightly different form of the divide-by-zero mentality that underlies the spammers' economic models. As it applies to email, if the marginal cost of another million spams is taken to be zero but it finds one more sucker to send $39 for herbal viagra, then the RoI looks infinite--to the spammer, and to hell with everyone else. Almost the same for domains in terms of creating channels for the money.

    Unfortunately, as is the standard half-arsed style of Google these years, it's only a minor treatment of the symptom. In general, the issuing of new domains needs to be made much more expensive, and that would require a broad approach (though of course Google would need to be included). However, Google could do quite a bit more on its own.

    However, I continue to believe that a stronger treatment would be focused on crowd-based tools to disrupt the spammers' business models, and especially to get between the spammers and their extremely limited supply of suckers. Cut off the money and the spammers will find other less-visible rocks to crawl under.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      a

      Like mugging real grannies instead of virtual ones? :(

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Dear SearchEngines:

    put some web sense into your bots. In fact, buy WebSense (or one of their competitors) and create some new categories:

    1) SEO firms (all they do is keep your AI developers employed)

    2) aggregators (why would you ever index another search engine)

    3) competitors (why drive business to them...unless they run adwords?)

    4) litigants

    5) ...

    And stop indexing them. If you don't index them, then you can't be taken to court because you "filter" your search results because there won't actually be any pages to search to generate results.

    This isn't evil, not really, well, it is actually. But not as evil as sending a guy with sandpaper and rubbing alcohol to make sure they understand the message "Don't ever do that again!" Also evil would be having competitions for 'the least desired category of the month' and then dropping them from your indexing bot for 90 days....that would be evil.

    Vote me up, that's ok. Vote me down, that's ok too, but I'd ask you to explain your solution to the problem.

  22. Alan Brown Silver badge
    FAIL

    .co.ck

    That was my fault. When we setup the .ck TLD there was a coin toss between .co.ck and com.ck

    I didn't even realise the significance of shorter version until someone tried to register big.co.ck

  23. ex-consultant
    Angel

    People power

    1. I have many more domains in my Yahoo spam blocker list they might want to add.

    2. Why don't we all register a FREE domain on co.cc and fill it with quotes from religious texts? Choose your own religion.

    1. Anteaus
      Megaphone

      @ex-consultant

      "Evil has raised a great many unbelievers in a far off place. They must be shown the Path." (9.03 "Origin Part 3")

      "Great holy armies shall be gathered and trained to fight all who embrace evil. In the name of the Gods, ships shall be built to carry our warriors out amongst the stars and we will spread Origin to all the unbelievers. The power of the Ori will be felt far and wide and the wicked shall be vanquished." (The Doci, "Origin Part 3")

      "What is a god, but a being that is worshipped by those beneath?"

      "Life and death, light and darkness, hope and despair. The rift was created, and on that day, the Ori were born. But the hatred of those who strayed from the true path festered and bloomed in the dark corners of the Avernakis to which they have been cast! And consumed by this hatred, they poisoned all they touched, bringing death, darkness and despair. And the souls of their victims knew no peace, until the Ori came and whispered to them: ‘Sleep, for the end draws near!’ And on that day all will rejoice, when the Ori come and lay them low."

      <drone...drone...drone...drone......>

      -Need any more? <g>

  24. John K
    Happy

    Other search engines are available

    Bing - o

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