.info domain names are officially worthless!

.info Domain Names are Synonymous with SPAM

.info domain names have come down so far in price that Spammers have been buying them up by the thousands and this has resulted in .info domains becoming worthless.

Google Ban .info Domain Names

It has to be said that there are thousands of legitimate .info domain names on the Internet, so before I get dozens of emails from non spammers that own .info sites - I am not having a go, or suggesting that everyone that has a .info domain name is a spammer, they are not. Unfortunately, the domain extension has been hijacked by spam sites, so if you are thinking of buying one for a new site - and you are not a spammer - don’t waste your money!

Google, in fact, removed all .info domains from the Google index on the 25th May, although many of them re-appeared in a couple of days, although many of them lost most of their positions. I couldn’t find any official comment from Google, but I suspect they intended to penalise the spammers, but ended up punishing everyone with a  dot info domain name in error.

The purpose of this rambling is not to slate .info domains or .info site owners, but to warn potential .info domain name buyers not to bother. If Google are viewing even half of them as spam, you can almost guarantee that all new sites will be looked upon with suspicion and at the very least, your site could end up being sandboxed for a fairly long time.

When buying domain names for a UK audience, buy .co.uk or .com and host in the UK. If they are taken, don’t look for alternative extensions, look for an alternative name. If someone is selling the same products as you and is on the index page of Google for a search term that you are targeting and he has the same domain name, but a different domain extension, (TLD), there is a 99% chance that you will never feature on the front page for that term.

Anyway, enough of the preaching and on with some work!

One Response to “.info domain names are officially worthless!”

Jerad Says:

You are right, I have lost all but one of my .info domains from the Google index and didn’t get them back. It seems that .info domain names are indeed, worthless!

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