Google has taken its fight against spammy sites to the next level. It has decided to stop indexing all co.cc websites.
This move on the part of Google has affected over 11 million sites, who have been removed from Google’s index, and that is quite a large number. It appears that a significant number of websites using this domain were spammy or shady websites. But unfortunately those who were running genuine websites have also been affected by this blanket decision. Try searching for co.cc sites and see.
Says Matt Cutts of Google:
We absolutely do try to be granular, but I wanted to mention that if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole.
The .cc top-level domain belongs to the Cocos Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Co.cc is a Korean company based which offers free or almost free subdomains to anyone who is intersted in getting one, and it is this subdomain which has been affected.
So what next? Will these spammy sites shut down their business? Or will they just get a new domain like .biz which is low-cost? Or perhaps simply move on to create a free account on wordpress.com or blogspot.com?
