SEO Research: Indexed … With No Links or Submission
I’ve just seen this in Google on an experiment an acquaintance of mine is running (she doesn’t blog on SEO, hence it being here; she also OKayed me writing this up). A recently registered domain, without having any links pointing to it, is now indexed.
There’s private registration, although because she didn’t immediately “activate” private registration, with Namecheap, it’s possible to see the old registrant info prior to activation. The person who registered it has some other trusted/well-ranking sites, so it’s possible that by correlating the whois info, Google is expecting that this will be a quality site and decided to index it.
Myself being a Namecheap client (thanks Smaxor for the free SSL tip), I decided to speak to support. They don’t autosubmit domain names to Google. So submission is not the reason the domain is indexed.
What’s also interesting is that when this domain - a nonsense keyword domain - was registered, there were 0 results for the madeup keyword. Now there are a few besides my contact’s domain; she and I have searched for it a couple of times. Perhaps Google [supplemental?] indexes pages that it wouldn’t otherwise index when it realizes they have unique keywords on them that are being searched for. Of course, that could easily lend itself to abuse, which is something Google’s engineers are weary of when deciding if a criteria is worth using.
A final possibility I considered is that there’s a trojan on my friend’s computer or mine. Keystroke logging might then have got spammers to find these keywords and autogenerate the junk constituting the rest of the SERPs [which, again, weren't there when he decided on that nonsense keyword]. I think this is the least likely of the possibilities though.
Update: My friend Andrew Shotland has a post featuring over a dozen techniques to get indexed without links or submission!
I think it is much more likely that the site was indexed because of the WhoIs Data. The domain lives and is linkable from the WhoIs and surprisingly many WhoIs databases are crawled quite often. Because the ICANN (or Verisign) database is public, the domain is listed and provided to other WhoIs hosts.
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Comment by Ben — July 31, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
This happens to me all the time. Faster with blogs (I wonder, is it due to Wordpress pinging Google?).
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Daniele Reply:
March 31st, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Ann, good idea… I think it’s possibile. When you finish to install WP, it asks you if you want your blog into the search engines. Is it possible in that moment WP pings Google?
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Comment by Ann Smarty — August 1, 2008 @ 10:15 am
Ben, my inclination is due to the Whois as well.
Ann, the site in question was non-blog. It wasn’t a question of pinging either, which I would have highlighted if it had been.
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Comment by Gab — August 3, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
[...] this post about spam, get my RSS feed! Also, you’ll probably be interested in this post, “Indexed - With no links or submission,” to find out how it happened and what signal probably triggered [...]
Pingback by Can You Swing To the Comment Spam Two-Step? | SEO ROI Services. Need an SEO Rockstar? Contact Us. Prices $3K-$10K/mo — August 5, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
Another idea. When you finish to install WP, a first blog post “Hello, world!” appears online.
In this moment, it pings all of websites in the blogroll, that ping the blog.
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Comment by Daniele — March 31, 2009 @ 12:53 pm