CircleID

I have several sites in subdomains of dan.info, such as domains.dan.info, and they seem to be well-ranked in search engines under relevant queries.

A search of the engines for 'Spain'

A .info site is No 3 out of 875,000,000 pages
[url="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=spain&meta;=" title="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=spain<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=spain</a<

<strong<A .info site is No 1 out of 311,000,000 pages</strong<
<a href="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=spain&fr=FP-tab-web-t500&toggle=1&cop;=&ei=UTF-8" " title="http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=spain"]http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=spain[/url]

A .info site is No 1 out of 54,567,840 pages
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=spain

Guys, noticed what I said:

It would be unfortunate for search engines to start discounting a site’s rank because of its domain extension.

So I don't understand why you are taking time to point out that many .info domains are ranked well now.  I have several .info domains that are ranked well. 

The point is that if these issues continue we might start seeing search engines discount the domain.  They might start by discounting the value of links from .info domains.  This isn't a stretch, since many search engines give bonus value to links from .edu domains.

Googlespamming is getting to be a nuisance - but .biz and .info are already widely enough abused by email spammers that finding those in a URL, in email, tends to get that email a fairly high score in spamassassin.  Or at least with some filters, an outright block on the message.

This isn’t a stretch, since many search engines give bonus value to links from .edu domains.

The Engines are agnostic towards the .TLD part of incoming links.

This isn’t a stretch, since many search engines give bonus value to links from .edu domains.
is a common fallacy.

The Engines are agnostic towards the .TLD part of incoming links.

This isn't a fallacy.  Several search engines give higher weight to .edu tlds.  This has played a larger part in rankings as search engines have tried to counterattack people buying links.

Representives from the major engines have stately publically that they do not weight on TLD.

In our tests we have not seen any weighting on the TLD in the link. What matters is the content at the end of the link.

gpmgroup.com, that's possible.  I'm going on what employees of several search engines have told me, but I guess it's not entirely relevant to the discussion.

The registrar Registerfly has an interesting twist on this practice.

They register hundreds of .info domain names for splogging, and instead of using fictitious whois data, they use the actual contact data of people with whom they have had any of the multiple reported problems with Registerfly generally.  These names include cybersquatted domain names containing famous trademarks, among other things.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who is tracking .info splogging and who may have noticed large numbers of splogged .info names registered via Registerfly.