Google has removed more than 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine index.
Google has modified its malware detection system to identify sub-domain level services which have been used by criminals to register thousands of domains and host malware and fake anti-virus software. As the result of these changes, Google has removed more than 11 million .co.cc websites from it search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are simply spam or low-quality.
According to a recent report by Anti-Phishing Working Group, the .cc top-level domain hosted around 5,000 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010. This number is almost twice the number of any other domain extensions.
The .cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google’s changes.
