Today, through a posting on the Abakus-forum, I stumbled upon the discussion worthy business practices of the Domainunion AG. At first glance they are a provider like every other, though it seems that they put their focus not only on the allocation of webspace and e-mail accounts: the free “SEO service” that they are advertising on their homepage has, in Domainunion's specific realization, high risks for the ranking of their client-domains in searchengines. This is basically about two things:

Domainunion adds a link to itself on the customers homepage besides their own informations about date and time. There are parallels to the sale/purchase of links here and seeing that the link to Domainunion is split in two (“Domain” and “union AG” are two separate links) can be seen as a sign that they are aware of the effect this has. As if this would not already be enough, it seems they are only delivering this box when a searchenginecrawler comes to visit the site – classical cloaking, which is prohibited in Google's Webmaster-Guidelines for example.

This is only bested by Domainunion seemingly setting up the subdomain “registrar” for domains and then posting a default- page there. Using a simple Google search, one can get a decent overview of the scope of this method. This site then links the customers domain (it seems that this is the “free SEO service”) and at the same time they are placing a few links to Domainunion itself: Domain, Mail, Webspace and Webhosting. Though that is not audacious enough, in the sourcecode for the site you can find another link in the <noframes>-area which, currently, holds the linktext “Schutzglas (safety-glass)” which links to a third site.

Every one of these Webmaster-Guideline-violations would be grounds for a removal of the site from the searchengineindex or at least a considerable depreciation of its ranking. With this accumulation of violations I am astonished that Domainunion's actions were not noticed much earlier – sadly in this case the uncritical “default-customer” does not have enough background-knowledge which leads them to trust Domainunion's statement on their homepage: “all services are commercial free, guaranteed”