Why Google does not rank freenom domains

Introduction

Freenom is a domain registrar and DNS service, provider. It also provides five free domains which are .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, and .gq. Although these are country-code top-level domains for Tokelau, Mali, Gabon, Central African Republic (.cf is an international domain), and Equatorial Guinea, netizens prefer calling them free domains as they are provided by freenom for free and can also be renewed after 12 months for free.

These domains are provided by Freenom for a lifetime and are renewed after 12 months. The irony here is that Freenom provides these domains free for 12 months but charges 6.95 dollars 575 rupees (as of October 2022, 1 dollar = 82.80 rupees) for 1 year.

This service is useful to students like me who can’t afford a .com or .in domain. As they can host their projects on Github pages or any other free hosting provider like infinity free with a custom domain.

Problem with free domains

The problems come here when you share something on your website, you want others to see it. The best way to reach people is to get your site indexed in Google.

Google is kind of biased toward free domains. It crawls the website like any other site, it also indexes it. But when it comes to ranking, no matter how well-written the article is or how valuable information it contains, it will never be going to rank even on the tenth page.

Only the homepage ranks and that too for limited keywords. Although this issue seems big not a single popular big website has covered it.

I registered a .ml domain from freenom in July 2020. First, hosted it on infinity free with WordPress. I never liked WordPress because building a site from scratch was preferable to me. I added an about me and a homepage on that site and it got ranked for a’ on the first position. A few days later I came to know that only the homepage is ranking on Google and the other pages cannot be found even on the last page of the search result.

I asked the Infinityfree community about this matter but they could not explain the reason behind it.

Possible reasons for the website not appearing in search results

I guessed at that time that maybe the reason is that Google relates Infinityfree servers with scam content and that’s why Google looks at my domain as untrustworthy. This guess was made on basis of Gmail putting the mails coming from Zoho (and other free email service providers with a custom domain) automatically into the Spam folder because Gmail relates Zoho servers as spam.

I decided to transfer my website to GitHub servers. Hosting my website on GitHub pages had some advantages too. GitHub only allows static content on the website which is way faster than dynamically generated files. With GitHub default supported Jekyll Cayman theme I built a Jekyll site and tried adding a few high-value content and web projects.

It was useless as Google sees my website as untrustworthy so it will not rank it.

I asked this question in Google forums 3 times but was unable to get an answer.

A guy in Google’s Webmaster Forum told me that he can see my website, when he is searching for the query, site:mayankvikash.ml

I don’t know why he was not getting that is not the problem I was talking about, my website is getting indexed and it also gets shown in the search results when you search with ‘the site’ operator but the blog or post pages are not getting ranked.

What is the solution

I tried everything with my freenom .ml domain. I did everything from doing all kinds of SEO tricks to increasing user experience. I published relevant quality content and build quality do-follow backlinks from websites like Hackernoon. I also made my website faster and removed everything that slows it down, and scored 95 out of 100 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

All of this was no use as free domains are blacklisted by Google, and for now, they are performing well on other search engines like Bing and Yandex.

So at last, I told my father about it and asked him to buy me a top-level domain. I bought a .in domain which is a country code top-level domain for India for around 715 rupees and can be renewed for some 800 rupees every year.

The only solution is to purchase a top-level domain.

I appreciate Google’s spam filter. It would be better if it only blacklists a particular domain that it founds spam and not the domain extension. I do know the fact that freenom domains are for personal projects and not to rank on Google for marketing purposes.

Alternatives to paid domains

If you can’t afford a paid domain then these are some of the alternatives you can try:

Although these platforms host your blog, your content cannot called be yours unless you host them on your domain. So it is always a better option to purchase a domain in case anyone can’t they can go with the services above.