It was only a matter of time before this happened. Due to excessive spamming, phishing etc. from free .co.cc subdomains, Google has banned the entire .co.cc domain from their search results. Remember, this never was a domain registry - it was just some company who was letting people make subdomains on their domain. If you have a .co.cc domain, this means you will no longer get any search traffic from Google. Your subdomain from them will no longer be anywhere on Google.
I started out on co.cc, there was nothing wrong with it, and there are supposedly just as much, if not more, .com domains with malware and other crud on them than co.cc. Some people have the mindset that co.cc is crap, to justify a purchase of a .com domain, but it was ok for me when I used it. It was the best free domain service I used. I'm a bit sad to see them go.
.co.cc is not dead, just Google decided to ban it from their search engine. I also started out on .co.cc domain and I felt that their service was OK but I found support from it was poor
Well I know they're not dead, but it's sad that we refer to it like that when Google does something like this I never needed support for my domains fortunately.
I agree, it was open up to so much abuse, I expect .co.cc were warned this could happen but decided not to take action against it but it is a shame to see legit users get penalised like this
I don't think it will happen to .tk as it is actually a valid ccTLD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk but for others that are just sub-domains like .co.nr & uni.cc, etc. it will most likely happen sooner or later
Was going to post this but I was just too busy. I am not surprised but I feel bad for the millions of people the use .co.cc. I remember my days using them.. This makes me wonder if they will close anytime in the near future because google banning them from searches is something very very big.
I don't think they will close but they will lose a lot of business that's for sure. On their Facebook page they keep claiming they they are in talks with Google and that they do check for all the malicious stuff, but I think they are just saying that to try and keep their customers happy.
I think this is good I know that almost everyone who is going to test something is going to use some free domain but if you want to test something,why should Google index your site? Spammers and scamers use co.cc and other free domains the most
I agree as well. That shouldn't have ever been a free domain to begin with. Too many ding dongs out there that didn't know how to use it properly. I myself used .co.cc briefly, but I never used their support so I don't know what that was like. I'm actually glad it's banned though, it'll save people from clicking on potentially dangerous links and stuff like that. I almost wish they would ban .tk as well. Never liked that one either as when you used that as a masker, all that happened was if you bookedmarked a site to your favorites, you didn't get whatever favicon (if any) the site had, you were stuck with the stupid .tk logo, and I don't like that.
Exactly, if .co.cc got banned it puts all these up in risk to. .co.cc has nothing wrong with it, and is the starting point for many websites that start out and don't have money. Sad to see that it's come to this. Thanks however for sharing this Ashley, because I never would've known otherwise.
