www.betterwhois.com is a good site (but not the only one) for finding the WHOIS information on any domain. WHOIS contains the name, address and email of the registrant. http://whois.domaintools.com/ is also quite awesome, but we use them more for IP addresses than domain names.
Sometimes at a place like betterwhois you are told that the registrar isn’t sharing the information at the moment and you’re directed to search the WHOIS database at the registrar’s site. That’s cool tho, because having the aggregate search tell you where to search specifically is better than searching all WHOIS databases separately.
Since WHOIS is public information, when you register a domain you are able to pay extra to have your information obscured. Domains By Proxy is an example of a company that provides this service. They are the owner of your domain, by proxy, so your WHOIS information isn’t out there.
I’d venture to guess that more than half of the registrants using “private registrant” services are shady (which is what elmwood is pointing out). Surely, there are plenty of domain owners out there who just don’t want their address tied publicly to their Web site, and they have no evil intentions. But most of the time, the intentions are not as pure.
Incidentally, WHOIS records is a goldmine for scammers and spammers. I get emails all the time like Mangetout got but for my clients’ sites where my company is listed as the registrant. Well, I used to get them more before we beefed up our spam filters.
Many domain registrars allow you to perform a “whois lookup” into the global database which contains all the registrar informaiton. You can go hereand type in a domain name to see the registration information.
On preview, ZipperJJ’s answer is much more complete than mine. I do keep my registration information anonymous for the sole reason that I don’t want spammers to get my email address.
I’ve decided to remove the link, until I get confirmation whether they will permit the nofollow thing (I expect not, as they were quite specific that the link shouldn’t be labelled ‘sponsored’ or anything like that).
Dang, I didn’t realize that information was so easily available. (I own a domain and checked it and sure enough my home address is on there) Hope I don’t get any cyber-stalkers.
I’ll second that. Several of my employers have been customers, and their paper catalogs are ubiquitous in most manufacturing companies. I’m pretty sure they were around before there was a WWW.
Yeah, I didn’t have a problem with the character of the link target, but I’m not going to break the rules for the link, even if there’s little chance of being caught.
Well, interestingly, the gloves came off a bit when I emailed them to say I had removed the link while I investigated the Google policy angle - I got this:
It’s interesting, because it’s not really honest. They’re not trying to buy links for people to click on, they’re trying to subvert the Google ranking system. I think I’ve seen all I need to see now.
Looks reasonably legit from the satellite pic. Lots of trucks at the loading dock. Also, at least on the sat pic, the building is labeled uline shipping supplies, so google recognizes that they exist at that location. The area looks like a typical industrial park, and other buildings are labeled with other company names. You can tell alot from sat pix if you know what you’re looking at.