It was reported yesterday that Google has taken the decision to delete around 11 million .co.cc sub domains from its search index, meaning that any searches for these sites will yield zero results. After assessing it’s web-spam policy the internet giant deemed the domains “spammy” and removed the domain type for the protection of Google users.

The .co.cc domain type is not an officially approved sub domain like .co.uk or com.co and the domains are offered independently by a Korean company who simply own the domain co.cc, and subsequently offer anything.co.cc to their customers. The ccTLD .cc is the assigned domain for the Cocos Islands, which is an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The .cc domain itself is administered through Verisign, along with .tv, .com and .net and is unaffected by the changes Google have made.

The company offering these free .co.cc domains has been classed as a “freehost” by Google, and they have exercised their right to block the whole domain. A freehost is defined as a domain that will allow anyone to register a site based on that domain. Google do not mean to suggest that all freehosts are bad however, wordpress.com being an example of an extremely popular, reputable freehost.

Upon researching .co.cc domains it was discovered that these sub domains were being registered in their thousands, with the Korean company offering 15,000 sub domains for a fee of $1,000. The company’s website states that they have 5,741,810 different accounts, with a total of 11,403,223 domains registered to date. If these figures are accurate this makes .co.cc one of the largest “registries”, with the number of domains registered exceeding both .org and .uk.

Google’s anti-malware scanning systems already detected sites that distribute malware, however it was reported back on the 17th June 2011, on the official Google blog, that the system had been modified to detect bulk sub domain services which were being abused. They also state that if the cases are extreme, the system may flag the entire domain.

To give some further detail on how many of these domains have actually been traced to suspicious behaviour, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that 4,963 phishing attacks originated from .co.cc domains in the last six months of 2010 alone.

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team had this to say about the decision:

“…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. I think most savvy search/SEO folks would understand this completely, but I figure it's better to over-communicate than under-communicate.”

This is another unfortunate example of the minority who register domains for malicious purposes forcing action that affects other genuine users, who have a legitimate use for a service.

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