Google Bases Quality from Domain Profile

Many other SEO’s may have already heard of the talk at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago recently. Apparently, there was a panel of judges who sat in front of webmasters and reviewed numerous websites which were shot out to them. On the panel were the following:

Greg Boser
Tim Mayer
Danny Sullivan
Todd Friesen
Jake Baillie
Matt Cutts

However, the response from Matt Cutts to a webmaster who asked to have his real-estate licensing website reviewed was astonishing.

Matt Cutts mentioned that he has nearly 50 other domain names which are related to military training and the study of Spanish. The webmaster immediately asked why this had anything to do with his current real-estate licensing website.

Nobody could see the tool that Matt Cutts was using, since he had his laptop facing away from the other panel members and made sure the camera couldn’t see what he was doing on his laptop.

Now a good amount of assumptions were made from this little comment, but the most common one is “Does Google rate a website according to the relativity to the other domain names a webmaster owns?” and as a response, Matt Cutts (from what I heard) said, “If you owned all these other domain names, how will you spend time adding content to each one?”

I would have asked him if this rule applies to websites which are selling a service or product, which really doesn’t focus on content building - like web hosting.

This would also solve the mystery of why Google would bother becoming a Domain Name Registrar. Since they are partners with a few domain name registrars like GoDaddy (one of the biggest registrars used by SEO webmasters), they could easily take a peek at which domain names registered on GoDaddy are used by a specific webmaster; despite private registration.

Obviously this is going to cause a ton of controversy, since people are going to want to start getting relative domain names if Google really does base the quality of a website on the domain name profile of a webmaster.

Technorati Tags: SEO, SES, Matt Cutts, domain, Registrar, GoDaddy