A recent decision by Google to remove all sites from the sub domain CO.CC is a warning to everyone to be wary about who their neighbours are.
Data collected at Google highlighted that the vast majority of websites hosted on this freehost domain were in fact Spammy or low quality and as a consequence the company decided to remove all records from their search engine. Search results for websites in this sub domain now result in the message “Your search – site:co.cc – did not match any documents".
This may appear heavy handed and no doubt a number of legitimate businesses have been hurt by this decision however
Google reserves the right to maintain the integrity of their service.
The domain has not yet been banned in AdWords however support forum posts do suggest staying away from .co.cc domains as they are definitely in a bad neighbourhood.”
As a web marketer, this decision co.cc ban illustrates the importance of hosting your content on domains that you own.