Whois privacy - effect on rankings?

I was pondering whether or not using whois privacy would have any effect on page rankings. My gut instinct is to say there's a slim chance it would hurt.

But G has its sneaky ways to add up all the factors in your site's reputation, so if things like what part of the world your server is located in and if you have multiple sites on a single IP and all that kind of thing are factored in, G could easily look to see if your whois data contains one of the several known "private" contacts that are provided by registrars.

1) Do you think private whois could hurt page rank?

2) Would it be just as effective (or better?) to have NON-private whois using FAKE name and address?

Doesn't make a difference. I don't think that Google would waste their resources to test a factor like whois information. All you would have to do to test it would be to create a few sites. If every single site never gets indexed, then it's probably just you. Seeing as how nobody has ever said that (in my travels) it is not a factor.

Doesn't

Longover said:

Doesn't make a difference. I don't think that Google would waste their resources to test a factor like whois information. All you would have to do to test it would be to create a few sites. If every single site never gets indexed, then it's probably just you. Seeing as how nobody has ever said that (in my travels) it is not a factor.

Click to expand...

Well, I'm not suggesting it would prevent you from getting indexed - that'd be ridiculous - but just that you could take a hit in rankings because of it ..... and perhaps it would only count against you if you also tested positive for several other negative factors.

But in the end, I'd tend to think this kind of stuff is probably for the tin hat wearing crowd and y'all are probably right - nothing to worry about.

Just thinking out lout. Thanks for the replies.