During the Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum at PubCon, Google Engineer Matt Cutts uttered a now famous sentence “Let’s be frank, you and I: how many sites do you have?” He then proceeded to list off domain after domain that the owner of realestatelicense.com (who had volunteered to have their site reviewed) admitted to owning. This immediately set off a firestorm of speculation about Matt’s secret tools and more importantly – what kind of information Google was collecting about webmasters.
I have been reading all of the different posts and speculation about this over the last couple of weeks and decided to do something simple yesterday morning – a WhoIs lookup for the site that was being reviewed – realestatelicense.com.
Hmmm – doesn’t seem to be anything private about this one. All of their information is right there in plain view (some info blurred out by me):
It’s obvious from this that the main domain is alliedschools.com so just to be sure I ran a quick whois on alliedschools.com – yup, it’s the same owner. Then I took a quick stroll over to alliedschools.com and saw this:
Yep – all of the domains Matt was listing in one, nice easy list – courtesy of the site’s owner. You’ll notice that they are using nofollow on many of them (highlighted in pink thanks to SEO for FireFox).
So it looks like the only tools Matt was actually using (in this case at least) was a simple WhoIs lookup and he let the site owner basically do the rest for him. Does this mean that Matt/Google don’t have any secret tools that we don’t know about? Absolutely not.
So why didn’t Matt come right out and tell everyone how he got this info when he did his recap of the session? That would be too easy. He likes to see the theories and it makes for good entertainment. I’m actually glad he didn’t because we got this great bit of information from Cshel as result.
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5 Responses to “The Matt Cutts Domain Question Answered”
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The order in which Matt asked about the domains reinforces this theory — he started asking in the same order they are listed on the alliedschools.com page.
I agree that it was done with common tools, and was about to write a similar post myself. The two things that I still have not resolved are:
1) How did Matt find teachmespanish.net? Given the site, I can see that it is registered by the same company, but I can’t determine how he found that site initially.
2) How did Matt get the 58+ sites figure, and so quickly? I only found about 43 outbound links from alliedschools.com. With more digging, I found 9 others from whois data (multiple domains on the same IP). I know this is close to 58+, but I’m obviously missing teachmespanish.net, so I wonder what else I’m missing — and how he found it.
Hi Keri -
Very good points!
What would make the most sense then is that he did a whois lookup on realestatelicense.com and then ran a name check (probably here with his own tool) for the registered owner of that site which is the same as teachmespanish.net. Which would then also give him the quick 58+ number.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, Dec. 4, 2006…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:……
Guys, its been known rule in the market to buy domain names in different names, or paying extra for not showing whois information.
I don’t get the point of people jumping up in their chairs, just because Matts says something. It’s to much speculation about Google, and guess who’s earning on that.. In terms of Linkbaiting, Google is the perfect example.
[...] One tool was not mentioned when people were trying to determine how Matt Cutts found a plethora of domain names registered to the same person. While it turns out nearly all of the sites Matt listed were actually on the homepage of the parent organization, one could have gone to AboutUs.org and found many of those related sites. AboutUs.org “is a wiki whose goal is to create a free and valuable Internet resource containing information both about websites and other related data. The site was pre-populated with information about many different websites and thousands of updates are now being made by people each day” (from their about page). What their statement doesn’t mention is that the pre-populated information comes from a lot of Whois data, and many of those updates are people going to the site to remove their whois information from the aboutus website. [...]